Iago Santos Muraro
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Item type:Publication, Spurring and sustaining online consumer activism: the role of cause support and brand relationship in microlevel action framesResearch suggests that social media consumer activism can be motivated through multiple microlevel action frames (MAFs-or simply, microframes). In this study, we examine an online consumer activism campaign against the supermarket chain Carrefour in Brazil and develop a typology of microframes that emerged during this episode of consumer activism. We leverage Twitter data to illustrate the distinction between cause-oriented (centered on animal rights issues) and brandoriented MAFs (emphasizing consumer disappointment in Carrefour) and examine their influence on the emergence of other online consumer activism microframes. Our findings reveal the complex interplay between cause support (cause-oriented MAF) and perceptions of a brand transgression (brand-oriented MAF) to galvanize collective action. We theorize the roles of distinct MAFs in spurring and sustaining consumers' online mobilization. Practical recommendations for brand managers are discussed.Type:journal articleVolume:30Scopus© Citations 15 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, CAN GENERATIVE AI REPLACE HUMAN PARTICIPANTS IN COMMUNICATION RESEARCH? THE USE OF SYNTHETIC RESPONDENTS FOR MANIPULATION CHECKS IN EXPERIMENTSThis study explores whether generative AI, specifically synthetic respondents (SR) created through ChatGPT-4, can effectively support manipulation checks in communication experiments. While previous studies have validated SR's ability to emulate human responses in fields like consumer behavior and moral judgment, this study is among the first to use SR for manipulation checks in communication research. The study contrasts AI-simulated data using OpenAI's ChatGPT-4 with data collected from real humans (RH) via an online experiment about corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate social advocacy (CSA) communication. Key findings indicate that RH and SR yield similar response patterns across all demographic groups analyzed, but demographic variables showed varied influence on how RH and SR reacted to stimuli materials. Yet, the two samples rendered comparable results concerning manipulation effectiveness assessment, thus suggesting that SR can be a valuable tool for pretesting and refining stimuli before full-scale data collection with RH. Ethical and practical considerations surrounding AI use in communication research are discussed.Type:conference paper - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Beyond lip service: Building moral legitimacy via human rights communication on social media – An Instagram-based investigation.Gross corporate violations of human rights (HR) have fueled increasing demand for businesses to bear greater responsibility for protecting and developing HR. In response, many businesses have integrated HR into their corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate social advocacy (CSA) structures. However, corporate HR communication has received limited scholarly attention, and companies face considerable challenges in effectively engaging in corporate HR communication, particularly on social media (SM). Our study leverages Instagram data to address this gap by exploring how corporations utilize CSR and CSA communication strategies to engage in HR communication on SM. Our findings show that HR communication corresponds to a small portion of corporate SM communication and is predominantly centered around health, equality, and education issues. More importantly, we demonstrate that brands are rewarded on SM when their words are not just 'HR talk' but can demonstrate tangible actions and corporate openness to co-construct HR activities with external stakeholders. We consolidate our findings by conceptualizing the Human Rights Communication for Legitimacy (HRC4L) model for HR communication.Type:conference paper - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Does visual sustainability communication result in higher social media engagement? An Instagram-based investigation.Research Question This study examines the effectiveness of corporate marketing strategies for disclosing of sustainability initiatives through sustainability communication (SC) in visual-centric social media platforms. More specifically, our aims are threefold: 1) Characterizing social media visual SC across industry sectors, 2) examining the effectiveness of visual SC in terms of user engagement, and 3) investigating the role of sustainability topic consistency in generating higher social media engagement. SC, also known as green marketing communication (GMC), is defined as an instrument to outwardly and strategically demonstrate businesses’ concern and contributions toward environmental protection and restoration (Fischer et al. 2016; Godemann and Michelsen 2011). The burgeoning significance of social media for marketing communication and advertising has elevated them to crucial tools for corporate SC. Consequently, businesses are progressively marketing their sustainability initiatives via social media for legitimacy gains (Crapa, Latino, and Roma 2023; Ju, Dong, and Zhang 2021). However, research exploring the effectiveness of SC in visual-centric social media platforms is still nascent. Methods and Data Instagram provides an optimal and realistic backdrop to study visual SC. Using a custom Phyton code to access Instagram API, we extracted 39,400 corporate posts representing 394 brands listed in the Brandwatch Index (2019). We content-analyzed images (and video frames) in each post by relating them to eight United Nations’ (2015) sustainability development goals (SDGs) and examined corresponding Instagram audience engagement data – number of likes, comments, and users’ sentiment as expressed in comments. Users’ sentiment classification was conducted using a Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) algorithm (Loureiro et al. 2022), which represents a cutting-edge class of machine-learning algorithms for sentiment classification (Alaparthi and Mishra 2021). Summary of Findings Our research shows that despite widespread low visual SC frequency, there is considerable between-industry variability on Instagram regarding SC volume and sustainability topics prioritization. Additionally, our results uniquely demonstrate that visual SC’s impact on social media engagement is industry-dependent and that when reacting to visual SC, social media users lean more heavily towards the ‘heart’ button (likes) on Instagram instead of expressing their thoughts via commenting – a finding we explain through the lens of modality congruence and perceptual fluency (Fransen, Fennis, and Pruyn 2010; Lanska, Olds, and Westerman 2013; Leigh 1992). Moreover, organizations concentrating their communication efforts on a few selected SDGs (topic consistency) can more easily create social media engagement – thus emphasizing that topic consistency is critical for visual SC effectiveness. Key Contributions From an academic perspective, this research contributes to the emerging literature on GMC by focusing on the underinvestigated domain of visual communication and providing novel findings concerning the influence of industry sectors in generating an interpretative frame guiding consumers’ perceptions and online behaviors toward SC. From a practical standpoint, our study supplies brand managers and public relations professionals with original insights concerning the importance of maintaining a consistent message to drive favorable social media engagement.Type:conference paperVolume:35 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Unveiling sustainable business discourses on social media: A comprehensive Instagram-based investigation of corporate sustainability communication – Insights from three studies(2024-04-19); Over the past decade, there has been a significant interest in corporate sustainability communication from scholars and business leaders, spurred by the growing demand from diverse stakeholders for businesses to adopt sustainable practices. Communication plays a central role in corporate sustainability as it enables 1) stakeholders to assess the sustainability quality of organizations and 2) businesses to bolster their reputation. However, sustainability communication (SC) is complex and can be perceived as inauthentic and trigger skepticism, particularly in social media. We present three studies examining textual and visual SC on Instagram (IG). Our findings reveal significant differences in how industries prioritize and communicate sustainability on IG and demonstrate that in the context of social media SC, two popular sayings partially ring true: a picture is (or it can be) worth a thousand words, yet actions (or the evidence thereof seem to) speak louder than words.Type:conference paper - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, The Consumer Activism Motives Scale (CAMS): Conceptualization and Scale Development.(2024-06-28); Rifon, NoraCorporations sometimes do things not always in the best interest of consumers, society, and the environment. In response, consumers have increasingly come together to hold corporations accountable for their unethical practices (brand transgressions) through a multitude of activist-like behaviors. When companies transgress, consumers may turn to their shopping bags and social media accounts, among other forms of online and offline action, to stand against unethical corporate practices, commonly called consumer activism. The study of personal goals as a motivational driver has gained growing attention among consumer activism scholars. However, knowledge advancement is hindered by the need for a reliable and valid scale that can measure consumer activists’ personally motivated goals. Extant measures have some critical limitations. First, they were developed in the context of boycotting only, which limits their application to other activist-like behaviors. Second, they conflated different motivational constructs, creating problems of content and construct validity. Third, extant measures were proposed without systematically investigating construct breadth and dimensionality. This is a crucial step in scale development because it increases researchers’ confidence that relevant personal goals have been adequately identified and translated into a measurement protocol. This research addresses these limitations by proposing a measurement scale of consumer activism personal goals that observes best practices in scale development in the social sciences. Study 1 investigates the theoretical breadth of the construct and its dimensions and generates an initial pool of measurement items. This is accomplished through in-depth interviews with consumer activists, a panel discussion with experts, and cognitive interviews with consumer activists. Study 2 focuses on assessing the latent structure of the measurement scale via EFA. Finally, Study 3 provides additional statistical support concerning the final measurement protocol via CFA and measurement validity assessment. As a result, a 20-item measurement scale is proposed to indicate five personally motivated goals of consumer activists – the Consumer Activism Motivation Scale (CAMS). The CAMS can help researchers and practitioners in predicting various behavioral and perceptual outcomes in the context of consumer activism.Type:conference paper - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Automated image processing for visual sustainability communication: Methodological and practical insights for researchers on the example of Instagram(2024-04-19); ; Companies are increasingly turning to visual content for sustainability communication, particularly on social media platforms, such as Instagram and TikTok. However, researchers face considerable challenges in processing and analyzing visual sustainability communication (VSC) data. This is mostly because of an overreliance on conventional manual classification methods. Our presentation aims to share insights from our research related to emerging practical approaches how sustainability matters are visually depicted, how visual sustainability communication on social media can be automatically detected with machine learning, and applied for analysis of the effectiveness of VSC in terms of user engagement.Type:conference paper - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Viral Dialogic Encounters: Extending Dialogic Theory Through Social Media Virality for CSR CommunicationDialogic theory, initially proposed to foster two-way communication in Web 1.0, and its latest revision attempts risk losing practical applicability to inform dialogic social media (SM) communication. This is because dialogic theory mainly reimagines company-user dialogic relationships from static websites to SM without accounting for viral communication. This paper summarizes an ongoing research effort to further develop dialogic theory for SM communication and maximize its utility in leveraging SM interactivity and virality for relationship building. We do this by employing an inductive-deductive approach to analyze corporate social responsibility (CSR) posts from Instagram (N=704). Preliminary empirical results provide evidence that companies are already leveraging SM opportunities for the viral extension of dialogic communication. We propose that, by leveraging SM viral interactivity affordances, new dialogic strategies extend the concept of dialogue from company-user to company-user-user. Next, we outline a theoretical extension of dialogic theory, one that accounts for the symbiotic relationship between extant dialogic concepts and SM viral interactivity. Last, we outline our next step in this active research pursuit.Type:conference paper - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, CSR Communication on Instagram: Exploring CSR Signals and Countersignals in a Visually-Oriented Social Media Platform(2023-05-26); ; Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) communication is increasingly pursued in interactive form over social media. This has given rise to research on the effectiveness of social media CSR posts. Most of this research considers Twitter and Facebook, while recent visual social media such as Instagram (IG) are yet underexplored. By referring to signaling theory, this paper explores the effects of both IG CSR posts (signals) and their components (CSR image and text) on user engagement in the form of likes and comments (countersignals). A computational research approach was employed to scrape 39'400 IG posts with associated audience engagement information in terms of likes and comments (544,031) of 394 companies. The data analysis reveals that compared to non-CSR posts, CSR posts tend to result in a lower number of likes and comments and an increase in the proportion of negative comments. However, this negative effect of CSR communication on IG seems to vary between companies and across industries considerably, thus suggesting that CSR communication effectiveness is not only a function of CSR post features, but also users' perceptions about business entities. With these insights, the paper adds to the knowledge about the effects of CSR posts in visual-oriented social media and provides guidelines on how to design effective IG CSR posts.Type:conference paper - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, ADVOCACY-INTEGRATED CSR: CONCEPTUALIZING AND EXAMINING THE INTEGRATION OF CSR AND SOCIAL ADVOCACY CALL-TO-ACTION IN ORGANIC SOCIAL MEDIA COMMUNICATIONCorporate engagement with human rights (HR) issues has become a market norm, with companies increasingly taking strong stances on such issues via Corporate Social Advocacy (CSA) in addition to their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) efforts. This study provides original systematization to CSR-CSA integration, referred to as advocacy-integrated CSR (AICSR), in organic social media (SM) communication. We focus on answering a crucial question with theoretical and practical ramifications: Does incorporating CSA into CSR communication introduce additional risks, or is it more likely to enhance communication effectiveness than CSR alone? Using an experimental design (N=408), we statistically test how four CSR-AICSR communication strategies affect perceptions of corporate altruism and egoism and, in turn, influence moral legitimacy building and SM engagement. Our findings reveal that AICSR communication enhances perceptions of corporate altruism relative to CSR alone, but only when coupled with concrete evidence of corporate issue commitment (substantive AICSR). However, this integration can also provoke stronger negative reactions from hostile audiences, emphasizing the need for corporations to weigh the risks and benefits of adopting AICSR in HR communications taking into account audience's attitude toward issues.Type:working paper