The role of emotions in B2B product advertising on social media: a family business case study

Purpose

The outbreak of Covid-19 increased the average time spent on social media (SM). This led to a transformation in how companies manage their digital marketing channels and created additional pressure for business-to-business (B2B) and family businesses, which tend to focus more on personal relationships with customers and stakeholders than on the implementation of digital marketing strategies on SM. The present research examines the case study of a Facebook advertising campaign created to promote the products and business values of an Italian family firm specialising in the production and commercialisation of biostimulants for agriculture.

Design/methodology/approach

The research aims to combine digital marketing avenues (i.e. a Facebook advertising campaign) with established psychological and behavioural theories, such as the dual process theories, by comparing the effects of two promotional videos (emotional vs functional).

Findings

The results suggest that emotional videos generate more passive behaviours, such as views, as well as active behaviours in the form of likes, comments and shares, while functional videos induce people to search for more information about the advertised products.

Originality/value

This is the first study to validate the role of Facebook advertising campaigns in developing an information-based approach to B2B family firms by testing the effectiveness of a targeted campaign comparing the impact of emotional and functional cues on increasing users' engagement while optimising the circulation of video content. The study helps to reduce the academic–practice gap by investigating the example of a fruitful integration between academic research and management practice.

Deepfakes Unmasked: The Effects of Information Priming and Bullshit Receptivity on Deepfake Recognition and Sharing Intention

The study aims to test whether simple priming of deepfake (DF) information significantly increases users' ability to recognize DF media. Although undoubtedly fascinating from a technological point of view, these highly realistic artificial intelligent (AI)-generated fake videos hold high deceptive potential. Both practitioners and institutions are thus joining forces to develop debunking strategies to counter the spread of such difficult-to-recognize and potentially misleading video content. On this premise, this study addresses the following research questions: does simple priming with the definition of DFs and information about their potentially harmful applications increase users' ability to recognize DFs? Does bullshit receptivity, as an individual tendency to be overly accepting of epistemically suspect beliefs, moderate the relationship between such priming and DF recognition? Results indicate that the development of strategies to counter the deceitfulness of DFs from an educational and cultural perspective might work well, but only for people with a lower susceptibility to believe willfully misleading claims. Finally, through a serial mediation analysis, we show that DF recognition does, in turn, negatively impact users' sharing intention, thus limiting the potential harm of DFs at the very root of one of their strengths: virality. We discuss the implications of our finding that society's defense against DFs could benefit from a simple reasoned digital literacy intervention.