Branding in the age of social media is thriving as companies continue to pour resources into digital campaigns in the hope of engaging their customers. The onset of the COVID- 19 pandemic boosted the importance of digital communication channels as physical distancing and lockdown measures disrupted business-as-usual and limited in-person interactions between firms and their customers. By implication, the global crisis pressed companies to deliver brand messages via online content to sustain or build customer relationships. This research focuses first on the branded content of corporate communications during the pandemic, focusing specifically on whether firms used the opportunity to showcase shared personal values. Second, we examine whether using value words in social media messages impacts customer engagement with these messages.
To address these related questions, we collected Twitter data from Fortune 500 firms posted between January 2020 until the end of August 2020, attending to 56,770 firm- initiated tweets (we excluded firm responses to customer messages). The first study examines the personal values expressed in the messages using the Personal Values Dictionary, based on Shalom Schwartz’s original ten-value typology. We argue that the unprompted expression of values in a text is a behavioural indicator of personal value priorities. The findings compare firms’ shifting value priorities over time and association with key events, namely the global pandemic declaration (March 11, 2020) and ensuing lockdowns and George Floyd’s murder (May 25, 2020), and BLM protests. We find that, indeed, companies did shift their value priorities. The second study assesses consumer response to the values companies put forth in their tweets, focusing on social media indicators of consumer engagement (CE), including the number of likes, retweets, replies, and CE correlation with the values promoted in the tweets. We observe a pre- post-crisis shift in CE with value-laden messages. Our findings provide managerial insights that can guide marketers to manage their social media content more efficiently and better align their marketing and branding efforts with customers' values in times of crisis.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/42416 |
| Date | 16 July 2021 |
| Creators | Amozegar, Mahdiyeh |
| Contributors | Mulvey, Michael S. |
| Publisher | Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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