The Impact of Regulatory Focus and Message Frame on Consumers' Responses to Promotional Campaigns on Social Networking Sites (SNSs)
A myriad of past research has paid specialized attention to the success and popularity of social media with respect to social influence and business profitability. Marketing industry has tried to acquire, utilize, or invest in social media especially for brand-customer relationship management in terms of interactivity and cost-efficiency. However, past studies have voiced concerns about potentially vulnerable persuasiveness of social media in conjunction with individual traits and message characteristics. To address this research gap, the authors investigate the effect of consumers' regulatory focus (preventionfocused vs. promotion-focused) and message frame (positive vs. negative) on their processing promotional messages on social media. Drawing from extant literature, four research questions are advanced and empirically examined in an experimental design. Findings demonstrate that for promotion-focused consumers, a positively-framed social media message is more effective whereas there is little difference for prevention-focused consumers. Also, the cognitive responses of consumers with a dominant regulatory focus are differently elicited due to the match between regulatory focus and message frame in the context of social media. This article draws on extensive prior literature to offer a discussion of the increasingly complex issues related to social media campaigns. Information presented in this article is useful to social media marketing managers and educators for understanding the effects of the interaction between consumers' traits and message characteristics with the aim of facilitating the overall effectiveness of social media marketing communications.
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