When sharing means changing

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Context

Today, social media empower consumers who can freely express they thoughts (whether they are positive or negative) about brands. However, do we really speak our minds when sharing about brands? As explained in this blog post, social media is about strengthening relationships with others and showing one’s best. In an article published in 2021 in the Journal of Business Research, Lu, Xie, Yang and Lei show that the need to please or get along with others may influence the way people share brands.

Research questions

When people interact with others, they sometimes tailor the message to the position of their audience. This is called audience tuning. Audience tuning explains why some people change their mind when sharing their opinions about a brand with others. However, all consumers may not have a predisposition for audience tuning. For instance, a strong-minded person will not easily stray from his/her principles. This is why Lu, Xie, Yang and Lei’s research is founded on communion-agency theory. This theory postulates that two types of social-relationship behaviors exist:
– the agentic type: agency-oriented people are self-oriented and individualistic. They value competence and self-confidence.
– the communal type:  communion-oriented people think of others when making decisions, have a strong sense of community and collectivity and value cooperativeness and selflessness.

Since the agency-communion orientation of a person determines their social behavior, it should logically affect their social behavior in the specific context of brand sharing. Therefore, the article aims at answering the following research question: does the agency-communion orientation of a person favor audience tuning in the context of brand sharing?

Method

To answer this question, Lu, Xie, Yang and Lei conducted 2 laboratory studies and 1 field experiment.

In studies 1 (conducted on 143 students) and 2 (conducted on 147 students), participants were assigned an orientation (agentic vs communal). They were presented with a text about a brand, and then asked to write a message to someone who, they were told, likes this brand. Some participants were asked to write a message about the brand, others were asked to write a message on an unrelated topic (control group). Moreover, the attitude of the participant toward the brand was measured after writing the message (studies 1 and 2) and before being asked to write the message (study 2). In other words, study 1 measured brand attitude after writing the message, while study measured the evolution of brand attitude throughout the experiment.

Study 3 involved 478 students. In this study, unlike the previous ones, agency-communion orientation was not manipulated but measured. Participants were asked to comment on a brand, talking to a person introduced either as the brand’s representative (therefore signaling that this person had a positive attitude towards the brand) or as a competitor’s representative (therefore signaling that this person had a negative attitude towards the brand). The authors also manipulated the length of the comment: participants were either asked to express themselves in one sentence (short message) or in detail (long message).

Since these studies involved messages written by participants, these messages had to be objectively coded to be properly interpreted. Consequently, the research assistants coding the texts were not aware of the purpose of the experiment.

Results

A person’s social orientation has an impact on his/her ability to resist audience tuning in the context of brand sharing. Put differently, people with a communal orientation tend to change their attitude towards a brand to accommodate others, while people with an agentic orientation do not adjust their position according to their interlocutor. This follows from the fact that communion-oriented people tend to think of others when making decision and value cooperativeness and being part of a collectivity. Therefore, when sharing about a brand, they try to get along with others, which drives them to adjust their position to reconcile with their interlocutor’s point of view, changing both how they share about the brand and their attitude towards the brand. Conversely, agency-oriented people tend to be self-oriented and value competence and self-confidence. Therefore, when sharing thoughts about a brand, they try to assert themselves, which drives them to stick to their own position.

– When asked to express their thoughts about a brand in short messages, people with a communal orientation adjust their position to reconcile with others less than when asked to express their thoughts in long messages. In other words, when they do not have enough words to express their exact thoughts, communion-oriented people do not attempt to accommodate others. Indeed, when messages are constrained, communicators cannot develop their thoughts as much as they would like: the shorter the message, the fewer details it can convey, the less people feel they can adjust their positions to accommodate others. In turn, when the message is short, communion-oriented people are less flexible about changing their positions, because they have difficulty developing thoughts or arguments that allow them to reconcile with others.     

Why is this article relevant for researchers?

This article enriches the audience-tuning literature because it proves that audience-tuning is induced by social-relationship motives. It also contributes to the literature on message length. The authors point out that these results may not hold in the long run or across cultures, which opens avenues for future research.

Moreover, these findings could be directly applied to the field of brand conversation or public evaluation, which are particular types of brand sharing. Future studies could also analyze how relationship with the audience (positive, negative, strong, hierarchical, etc) may affect the impact of the agency-communion orientation on brand attitude.

Why is this article relevant for professionals?

The authors advise professionals to create brand-sharing environments that favor interconnectedness, so that it creates a communal social motive that encourages people to adjust their position to match the prevailing opinion (if this opinion is positive). Moreover, for this process to take place, people should have the opportunity to express themselves without character limits.

Overall, the article is an incentive for brands to create and manage communities with a sense of belonging, systematically sharing all good word of mouth, so as to appeal to their consumers’ communal orientation. Banning anonymous comments may also dissuade consumers to adopt an agentic behavior. In turn, consumers will hesitate to step up should they have a claim or wish to share a negative opinion, and they will more likely express positive thoughts about the brand to prove they belong within the community. These findings also help understand the underlying dynamics behind public consumer reviews. It suggests that positive (negative) reviews will bring about more positive (negative) reviews.

This article is particularly relevant for community managers who arbitrate and nurture brand conversations every day, and who often have to deal with character limits. It invites marketers to be cautious when dealing with online communities, who cannot always express their thoughts in detail on social media. For instance, Facebook posts have a 63 206-character limit (8 000-character limit for comments), while maximum Instagram caption is 2 200 characters and maximum tweet length is 280 characters. In an (in)famous Twitter post, JK Rowling was skeptical of the expression “people who menstruate” which, she felt, was a twisted circumlocution to talk about women. However, transgender women do not menstruate. Consequently, JK Rowling’s awkward comment was perceived as transphobic and was criticized by many on social media. Due to Twitter’s character limit, it took three tweets for JK Rowling to rectify the situation, and explain that she had not meant to be offensive towards the transgender community.

Source: Lu, Y., Xie, N., Yang, D., & Lei, X. (2021). Can brand sharing change consumers’ brand attitudes? The roles of agency-communion orientation and message length. Journal of Business Research, 128, 350-359.

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