The „Research Seminar Series“ held by the WU's Marketing Department helps to connect our Faculty with international scholars from the Marketing field. They are invited to present their latest research and discuss the current trends and developments in all major areas of marketing. The seminar is open to all WU faculties and students.

Talk by Amitava Chattopadhyay, INSEAD (FR)

Title: “Beauty First: The Impact of Social Media Logos on Choice Abstract”

Abstract: In this research, the authors suggest that incidental exposure to social media logos, such as the logos of Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, often embedded in 3rd party marketing communication materials such as advertisements, websites, or even restaurant menus, could increase consumers’ choices of visually superior products, relative to choices of gustatorily or olfactorily superior products. Drawing on research spanning logos, impression management, social media marketing, philosophical aesthetics, and biological sciences, the authors argue that this happens because incidental exposure to social media logos momentarily increase consumers’ desire for impression management, which in turn leads them to prioritize visual properties in consumer decisions, since visual qualities are more transferable through social media and, thus, more effective for impression management. A series of online and lab experiments, including both hypothetical and consequential choices, provide empirical evidence for this main proposition. By being the first to show that social media logos nudge consumers to choose visually superior options, and empirically testing the underlying causal mechanism, the present research makes theoretical contributions to social media marketing, impression management, and logo research. The current findings also provide practical guidelines for marketers.

For all dates of the upcoming Marketing Research Seminar Series, please click here.

https://www.wu.ac.at/en/marketing/research/research-seminar-series/