TY - THES A1 - Reichstein, Thomas T1 - Enhancing Engagement – Understanding the Engagement Drivers of Social Media Content N2 - Social media is the staple of Internet consumption. There are currently 4.8 billion social media users worldwide. This means that almost every Internet user (5.18 billion) also consumes social media (Statista1, 2023). The enormous importance for the advertising market is underlined by the considerable advertising expenditure, which is expected to reach $ 207 billion in 2023 (Statista2, 2023). By comparison, traditional TV advertising is expected to reach $140 billion in 2023 (Statista3, 2023). However, social media is not only the ideal channel for marketers to advertise, but also to engage with their customers and strengthen their relationship with them (Lim & Rasul, 2022), as it has a positive impact on firm performance and word of mouth (de Oliveira Santini et al., 2020; Yost, Zhang, and Qi, 2021). As a result, companies want to know how to make their content, whether advertising or general, highly engaging. This dissertation aims to contribute to the following research question: “How can content engagement be increased, and what are the drivers of content engagement?" Thus, the first objective of this work is to provide an overview of the basic decision-making process of user engagement in social media. Part I of this dissertation shows that previous research has shed light on the tools used to create engaging images and videos, referred to as main content (Berger & Milkman, 2012; Reichstein & Brusch, 2019). However, less light has been shed on an important aspect that also strongly influences engagement: the factors surrounding the content, referred to in this paper as framework conditions. One example of framework conditions is the text that accompanies a post, known as the caption. The second objective of this dissertation, in Part II and Part III, is therefore to examine the effects of framework conditions, such as the text length of a caption, on engagement. Table 0.1 gives an overview of the three manuscripts used in this dissertation. Part I of this paper builds on the publication by Reichstein and Brusch (2019). This part provides a literature review on viral marketing, specifically an overview of the factors that influence content engagement. Viral marketing is a buzzword that represents the ideal of creating content that spreads like a virus. The section provides a definition of viral marketing and classifies the literature to date based on a hypothetical model. The model shows the decision-making process of individuals in social media, from receiving a content to making a decision to engage. 7 Part II builds on the published work of Reichstein, Brusch, and zu Ummeln (2021). An empirical study examines the effect of four framework factors (persons interested, title length, image, relationship information) on engagement and interest in Facebook events. The study is based on a survey that is analyzed using a statistical comparison of means. Additionally, the effect of emotions on engagement and interest is tested using correlation analysis. The results provide initial evidence that framework conditions influence engagement and interest. Furthermore, the strong effect of emotions on engagement, known from the literature (Berger & Milkman, 2012), is confirmed. Part III is based on the unpublished manuscript by Reichstein, Brusch, Dost, and Brusch (2023). This part examines the effect of the caption, which can be considered as the framework of a social media post, on engagement. The focal variable studied is the text length of the caption. In addition, the effect of emojis and hashtags on engagement is examined. Two experiments and field data from an onminchannel retailer and a travel influencer are used. The results show that the relationship between text length and engagement follows an inverted U-shape, and thus the optimal text length maximizes engagement. The effect is surprisingly strong. Estimates for the given datasets show a potential increase in likes of up to 25% per post on average by optimizing text length. The structure of this cumulative dissertation is as follows. The main part consists of the three papers (Part I, Part II, Part III). Each of them starts with a motivational part to clarify the contribution and the classification for the dissertation. It should be noted that the previously published papers (Part I and Part II) have been partially adjusted in language to unify the dissertation. At the end, there is a conclusion section that summarizes the findings of the paper. Y1 - 2024 CY - Cottbus ; Senftenberg ER - TY - GEN A1 - Dost, Florian T1 - Bidirectional Links between Aggregate Advertising and Goods Consumption at the National Level T2 - 46th Eurasia Business and Economics Society Conference Book N2 - A longstanding question in marketing and economics is whether all of advertising affects aggregate consumption. If it does not, the advertising–consumption system would be a zero-sum game; if it does, advertising can grow markets and represents an economic force of interest for marketing, economics, and public policy. Ashley, Granger, and Schmalensee (1980) test advertising’s potential causal impact on aggregate goods consumption. Challenging prior empirical studies that suggested advertising drives aggregate consumption (Taylor & Weiserbs, 1972), Ashley et al. show that advertising does not influence consumption; rather, consumption causes advertising in a landmark methodological study of the Granger causality test. Yet recent conceptualizations suggests this empirical result and especially the linear autoregression-based Granger method to be inconclusive. Wilkie and Moore (1999) propose a complex aggregate systems view to discussing macro impacts of marketing, and in such systems the Granger tests typically fails (Sugihara et al. 2012). The present research extends prior studies with a new more appropriate nonlinear method (convergence cross-mapping) to test the causal links between television or digital advertising and three types of aggregate consumption—durables, non-durables, and service consumption. The novel test, unlike the Granger causality test, confirms the existence of a bidirectional causal link between advertising and aggregate goods consumption. Specifically, and similar to the brand level, advertising effects on consumption are stronger for durable than for non-durable goods. KW - Marketing System, Aggregate Consumption, Convergent Cross-Mapping Y1 - 2024 UR - http://www.karyailmiah.trisakti.ac.id/uploads/kilmiah/dosen/46th_EBES_Conference_Program_and_Abstract_Book_(1).pdf SN - 978-605-71739-6-6 SP - 99 PB - EBES CY - Istanbul - Turkey ET - 1 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Maier, Erik A1 - Dost, Florian T1 - Decomposing cross-channel advertising support of retailer price promotions T2 - Journal of Retailing N2 - Retailers’ communication support for their price promotions is shifting from traditional flyers and circulars (so-called feature ads) to conventional media channels, especially digital ads. It is not clear, if and how supporting price promotion with advertising in digital media benefits sales of the promoted product above and beyond the price promotion itself. Further, retail managers require guidance on whether only the promoted product or also their overall business gains from ad support (e.g., from category or cross-period expansions) to negotiate trade promotion support with manufacturers of the promoted products. Using a field experiment with a grocery retailer, we decompose the effects of the advertising support of price discount promotions across digital and print marketing channels. We find that the effectiveness assessment of the advertising channels depends on the beneficiary: while digital channels most effectively support sales of the promoted product (35 % uplift vs. non-promotion period) – especially for popular consumer-pull products (+85 %), traditional print channels improve the performance for the retailer as a whole (+3 % uplift of the total category sales), with a combination of ads having the largest effect (+5 % uplift of the total category sales). This research offers guidance for retail and manufacturer managers tasked with designing price promotions and configuring the ad support across channels, and negotiating trade promotion budgets or manufacturer support for the advertisements. KW - Cross-channel advertising, Price promotions, Omnichannel, Discounts, Retail media Y1 - 2024 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretai.2024.05.002 VL - 100 IS - 3 SP - 362 EP - 381 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Florian, Dost A1 - Peschke, Christiane T1 - When Influencers Promote Their Own Products: Trust Perceptions Following Explicit Versus Implicit Promotion Styles T2 - Proceedings International Marketing Trends Conference 2024, Venice N2 - In recent years, influencer marketing has become a powerful tool for promoting products due to influencers' unique ability to captivate their followers’ attention effectively. Moreover, influencers often enjoy a high level of trust among their followers, enhancing the persuasiveness of their product endorsements. However, a relatively unexplored question in the current literature is how trust perceptions are affected when influencers promote their own branded products. Our research investigates the impact of influencers’ own brand promotions on trust, considering explicit endorsement versus subtle implicit integration into content. We find that trust increases when influencers implicitly integrate their branded products, akin to product placement. This is particularly noteworthy when influencers are endorsing their own, lesser- known products, as compared to national brand products. Nevertheless, the implicit promotion may reduce awareness of the promoted product. Mediation analyses reveal opposing effects of trust towards the influencer and product awareness on purchase intentions, nearly offsetting each other. KW - Influencer marketing, product placement, influencer-branded products, trust Y1 - 2024 UR - https://archives.marketing-trends-congress.com/2024/pages/PDF/27.pdf SN - 978-2-490372-18-8 SP - 1 EP - 8 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Reichstein, Thomas A1 - Dost, Florian A1 - Galle, Clara T1 - May I have your attention, please! Social Media Engagement does not always reflect user attention N2 - User engagement with social media content is the primary currency for social media marketers. An implicit assumption is that high engagement reflects high user attention to content. Surprisingly, this assumption has not been tested, and many users may only habitually engage with content without paying much attention to it. Using an eye-tracking experiment to examine subjects' gaze trajectories across 161 social media posts, we show that attention is indeed a strong predictor of engagement. However, the strength of the prediction is moderated by text length and emojis, with surprising results. Thus, the implicit assumption that engagement reflects attention is often misplaced. KW - Eye-Tracking KW - Social Media Engagement Y1 - 2024 UR - https://proceedings.emac-online.org/pdfs/A2024-119852.pdf ER - TY - GEN A1 - Werner, Bastian A1 - Dost, Florian T1 - Range-based versus Point-based WTP/WTA Measures: New Findings for the Endowment Effect T2 - Proceedings of the European Marketing Academy N2 - Previous research has examined the well-known endowment effect using point-based measures of willingness to pay (WTP) and willingness to accept (WTA) values and found that this effect leads to market failure because sellers' WTA often exceeds buyers' WTP. This research examines the endowment effect using range-based measures of WTP and WTA, providing a more realistic perspective given bounded rationality and uncertainty conditions. To confirm the conceptual extensions and modifications of the endowment effect, we conceptually replicate a comprehensive point-based study on the endowment effect (Jefferson/Taplin, 2011) using range-based measures. Our results show an increased endowment effect but also less severe inefficiencies in a market, as there is significant overlap between WTP and WTA ranges, leading to a more efficient market than previously thought and more transactions taking place. Y1 - 2024 UR - https://proceedings.emac-online.org/pdfs/A2024-119665.pdf IS - 53 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Maier, Erik A1 - Dost, Florian T1 - Preventing the Death of the High Street T2 - Proceedings of the European Marketing Academy N2 - Inner-city store closures, the so-called “death of the high street”, are a phenomenon that affects retailers and municipalities across the globe. Extant research lacks an understanding of potential interventions that help mitigate this phenomenon. The present research uses unique observational panel data from 17,000 stores for the years 2015 and 2022 to test the effects of city-level government intervention (inner-city investment prize) on the propensity of local stores to fall empty or empty stores to see a store opening. Using a quasi-experiment (discontinuity of prize competition participants with or without prize money) and a Markov model, our results indicate that even modest government investment can help to reduce the probability of vacancies and increase the probability of store openings. Y1 - 2024 UR - https://proceedings.emac-online.org/pdfs/A2024-119687.pdf VL - 53 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Reichstein, Thomas A1 - Brusch, Ines A1 - Dost, Florian A1 - Brusch, Michael T1 - How To Optimize Your Social Media Caption To Generate More Engagement :) #Captionize #SocialMedia T2 - Proceedings of the European Marketing Academy, EMAC 2023 Annual, Odense, Denmark, May 24, 2023 N2 - Maximizing engagement is an important issue for social media managers. Science has already provided guidance on how to make content more engaging. However, one easy-to-edit part of the social media post has received little attention: The caption. We show that the caption has an underestimated impact on engagement and we specifically address text length. The relationship between text length and engagement is not linear as described in previous literature but follows an inverted U-shape. Using field data, we estimate the optimal length of captions and provide surprising results. We show that captions are mostly too short instead of too long and that an optimal length can increase the engagement rate by up to 17%. Y1 - 2023 UR - https://proceedings.emac-online.org/index.cfm?abstractid=A2023-114288&How%20To%20Optimize%20Your%20Social%20Media%20Caption%20To%20Gener PB - European Marketing Academy ER - TY - GEN A1 - Werner, Bastian A1 - Dost, Florian T1 - Behavioral Pricing and Innovative Pricing Mechanisms in Purchase Decisions- a Review and Recommandations for Future Research T2 - Proceedings of the European Marketing Academy, EMAC 2023 Annual, Odense, Denmark, May 24, 2023 KW - Pricing Y1 - 2023 UR - https://proceedings.emac-online.org/index.cfm?abstractid=A2023-114482&Behavioral%20Pricing%20and%20Innovative%20Pricing%20Mechanis ER - TY - GEN A1 - Rennie, Nicola A1 - Cleophas, Catherine A1 - Sykulski, Adam A1 - Dost, Florian T1 - Outlier detection in network revenue management T2 - OR Spectrum N2 - This paper presents an automated approach for providing ranked lists of outliers in observed demand to support analysts in network revenue management. Such network revenue management, e.g. for railway itineraries, needs accurate demand forecasts. However, demand outliers across or in parts of a network complicate accurate demand forecasting, and the network structure makes such demand outliers hard to detect. We propose a two-step approach combining clustering with functional outlier detection to identify outlying demand from network bookings observed on the leg level. The first step clusters legs to appropriately partition and pools booking patterns. The second step identifies outliers within each cluster and uses a novel aggregation method across legs to create a ranked alert list of affected instances. Our method outperforms analyses that consider leg data without regard for network implications and offers a computationally efficient alternative to storing and analysing all data on the itinerary level, especially in highly-connected networks where most customers book multi-leg products. A simulation study demonstrates the robustness of the approach and quantifies the potential revenue benefits from adjusting demand forecasts for offer optimisation. Finally, we illustrate the applicability based on empirical data obtained from Deutsche Bahn. KW - Analytics KW - Forecasting KW - Outlier Detection KW - Clustering Y1 - 2023 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s00291-023-00714-2 SN - 0171-6468 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Rennie, Nicola A1 - Cleophas, Catherine A1 - Sykulski, Adam A1 - Dost, Florian T1 - Analysing and visualising bike-sharing demand with outliers T2 - Discover Data N2 - Bike-sharing is a popular component of sustainable urban mobility. It requires anticipatory planning, e.g. of station locations and inventory, to balance expected demand and capacity. However, external factors such as extreme weather or glitches in public transport, can cause demand to deviate from baseline levels. Identifying such outliers keeps historic data reliable and improves forecasts. In this paper we show how outliers can be identified by clustering stations and applying a functional depth analysis. We apply our analysis techniques to the Washington D.C. Capital Bikeshare data set as the running example throughout the paper, but our methodology is general by design. Furthermore, we offer an array of meaningful visualisations to communicate findings and highlight patterns in demand. Last but not least, we formulate managerial recommendations on how to use both the demand forecast and the identified outliers in the bike-sharing planning process. KW - Analytics KW - Outlier Detection KW - Data Visualization Y1 - 2023 UR - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s44248-023-00001-z U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s44248-023-00001-z SN - 2731-6955 IS - 1 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Dost, Florian A1 - Maier, Erik T1 - Promoting Price Discounts across Channels: The Role of Discount Level and Product Sales Frequency T2 - Proceedings of the European Marketing Academy, EMAC 2023 Annual, Odense, Denmark, May 24, 2023 N2 - The most common promotional activity are price discounts, and retailers have to choose whether to further promote their price discounts with ads in offline (e.g., print) or online (e.g., banner ads) channels. However, retail managers lack guidance for which promotional channel (offline or online) would support price discounts best and what types of products (high or low sales frequency) would benefit most. Using a field experiment, we disentangle the interacting effects of price discounts (at various discount levels) and their supporting promotional channel. We find that digi-tal promotions of price discounts are more effective than non-digital print campaigns to increase sales beyond the base price discount effect. In addition, the product’s sales frequency matters: rela-tively, digital promotions best support price-discounted low-sales-frequency products, and steeply discounted high-sales-frequency products receive additional support from offline ads. Y1 - 2023 UR - https://proceedings.emac-online.org/index.cfm?abstractid=A2023-114395&Promoting%20Price%20Discounts%20across%20Channels:%20The%20Rol SN - 2709-1589 PB - European Marketing Academy ER -