SOCIAL CURRENCY - Consumer Response to Friendly Fire
Abstract: Social Currency has in this thesis, as in marketing practice, been defined as a marketing communication strategy in which a company accepts brand advocacy in social media as payment for their offering, contingent on the consumer meeting the requirements set by the company on the minimum size of the consumer's network. The exchange that is implied by the trade term social currency, theoretically falls under the definition of what is advertising and can be broken down to a barter exchange of a good of tangible value for brand advocacy in a well-connected consumer's network, where the consumer is paying for a good using online friendship - or more specifically online reach - as 'currency'. The practice is rather unique in its category for in this way managing to infiltrate 'real' friendships with commercial messages through the utilization of extrinsic motivations. The study aims to map out a framework for measuring consumer responses to social currency and for benchmarking the practice against traditional advertising. Three levels of consumer responses are examined: cognitive responses, affective responses, and conative responses. Further, inherent personal tendencies theorized to influence cognitive perceptions of social currency are explored. A quantitative study was conducted in the form of an experiment. Social currency proved to be perceived as more novel, more generous, more unethical, more injust, and more intrusive than traditional advertising. These cognitive perceptions of social currency are shown to have mediation effects on attitude toward the ad. The indirect effects of the cognitive responses on attitude toward the ad are suppressive of each other, with the perceptions of novelty and generosity that social currency evokes increasing attitude toward the ad and the perceptions of unethicality, injustice and intrusiveness decreasing it. In total the attitude toward the ad for social currency is found to be greater than that of traditional advertising. Narcissism and tie strength are shown to moderate the mediating relationships of the above cognitive responses on attitude toward the ad for social currency. The practice is found to generate higher levels of brand interest, online WoM and offline WoM compared to traditional advertising, all significantly correlating with attitude toward the ad. No significant effects were found for purchase intention. Consumer's willingness to pay showed tendencies of declining for social currency compared to traditional advertising, however no general conclusions could be drawn. The discussion of the implications of social currency as a marketing communication strategy raises important questions of the tradeoff between brand advocacy and the bottom line. What is really the value of a Facebook post
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