Applying social identity theory to the social media content strategy of a global brand: The role of brand- and user-generated content in global social identification

<p>The global marketplace is centred around products and brands that reflect certain identities. Social media can act as vehicles of meaning transfer for social identification between brands and social media users with a global social identity. Recognizing the importance of the psychological and sociological needs that draw social media users to build relationships with global brands, the purpose of this thesis is to explore the relevance of the global social identification process to global social media branding strategy. More specifically, this research considers the role and influence of social group membership dynamics to explore how brand-generated and user-generated content are part of the global social identification process. In that, this research aims to fill the gap where social identity theory has not been applied as a lens through which to understand and evaluate the social media content strategy of a global brand. This gap is important to fill due to the global social media arena’s social-centric nature and transparency in displaying social group memberships. An interpretive paradigm was used for this research, with a qualitative case study approach that consisted of interviews with global social media users/global brand representatives and a content analysis of the focal brands social media pages. The study found that the global social identification process on social media consists of two stages, global identity priming and global identity expression. Global identity priming occurs when the psychological and sociological function of global brands is transferred to brand-generated content through a semiotic meaning transfer process. Global identity expression can occur after, as a result of global identity priming, social media users with a global identity categorize the global brand into their in-group. Once in-group categorization takes place, creation and/or sharing of user-generated content with the global brand can be considered an act of identity expression and validation by those with a global identity. This has implications for a global brand’s social media content strategy, as the findings revealed that brand-generated content featuring certain symbolic global values facilitates the global social identification process on social media. Moreover, the findings revealed that user-generated content created by social media users for global identity expression purposes is of considerable value to global brands. Understanding how the global social identification process transpires on social media can guide global brands to consider how their content strategy can prime global social identification and meet the identity expression needs of those with a global identity. This has implications for content strategy design, social media interactions and ongoing global brand-user relationships.</p>

Applying social identity theory to the social media content strategy of a global brand: The role of brand- and user-generated content in global social identification

<p>The global marketplace is centred around products and brands that reflect certain identities. Social media can act as vehicles of meaning transfer for social identification between brands and social media users with a global social identity. Recognizing the importance of the psychological and sociological needs that draw social media users to build relationships with global brands, the purpose of this thesis is to explore the relevance of the global social identification process to global social media branding strategy. More specifically, this research considers the role and influence of social group membership dynamics to explore how brand-generated and user-generated content are part of the global social identification process. In that, this research aims to fill the gap where social identity theory has not been applied as a lens through which to understand and evaluate the social media content strategy of a global brand. This gap is important to fill due to the global social media arena’s social-centric nature and transparency in displaying social group memberships. An interpretive paradigm was used for this research, with a qualitative case study approach that consisted of interviews with global social media users/global brand representatives and a content analysis of the focal brands social media pages. The study found that the global social identification process on social media consists of two stages, global identity priming and global identity expression. Global identity priming occurs when the psychological and sociological function of global brands is transferred to brand-generated content through a semiotic meaning transfer process. Global identity expression can occur after, as a result of global identity priming, social media users with a global identity categorize the global brand into their in-group. Once in-group categorization takes place, creation and/or sharing of user-generated content with the global brand can be considered an act of identity expression and validation by those with a global identity. This has implications for a global brand’s social media content strategy, as the findings revealed that brand-generated content featuring certain symbolic global values facilitates the global social identification process on social media. Moreover, the findings revealed that user-generated content created by social media users for global identity expression purposes is of considerable value to global brands. Understanding how the global social identification process transpires on social media can guide global brands to consider how their content strategy can prime global social identification and meet the identity expression needs of those with a global identity. This has implications for content strategy design, social media interactions and ongoing global brand-user relationships.</p>

Memory for affixes in a long-lag priming paradigm

Psycholinguistic research on the processing of morphologically complex words has largely focused on debates about how/if lexical stems are recognized, stored and retrieved. Comparatively little processing research has investigated similar issues for functional affixes. In Word or Lexeme Based Morphology (Aronoff, 1994), affixes are not representational units on par with stems or roots. This view is in stark contrast to the claims of linguistic theories like Distributed Morphology (Halle &amp; Marantz, 1993), which assign rich representational content to affixes. We conducted a series of eight visual lexical decision studies, evaluating effects of derivational affix priming along with stem priming, identity priming, form priming and semantic priming at long and short lags. We find robust and consistent affix priming (but not semantic or form priming) with lags up to 33 items, supporting the position that affixes are morphemes, i.e., representational units on par with stems. Intriguingly, we find only weaker evidence for the long-lag stem priming effect found in other studies. We interpret this asymmetry in terms of the salience of different morphological contexts for recollection memory.

Does Partisan Identity Reduce Support for Electoral Fairness?

Despite strong theoretical reasons to expect an inverse relationship between strength of partisan identity and support for electoral fairness, little empirical evidence exists on this question. This paper analyzes two studies that implement a twin experimental approach to examining this relationship. In a candidate choice experiment, a one standard deviation increase in partisan social identity predicts about a 10 percent smaller penalty for violations of electoral fairness, with similar results in both studies. In Study 1, a randomly-assigned partisan identity priming treatment yields a similar relationship on a smaller scale, with an 0.1 standard deviation boost in identity producing about a 1 percent increase in support for anti-fairness candidates. In Study 2, the priming treatment fails to move identity and yields no corresponding change in support for electoral fairness. These results provide suggestive evidence on the relationship between partisanship and support for democratic values while highlighting lessons for future research.

Priming and persistence in bilinguals: What codeswitching tells us about lexical priming in sentential contexts*

Most studies on lexical priming have examined single words presented in isolation, despite language users rarely encountering words in such cases. The present study builds upon this by examining both within-language identity priming and across-language translation priming in sentential contexts. Highly proficient Spanish–English bilinguals read sentence-question pairs, where the sentence contained the prime and the question contained the target. At earlier stages of processing, we find evidence only of within-language identity priming; at later stages of processing, however, across-language translation priming surfaces, and becomes as strong as within-language identity priming. Increasing the time between the prime sentence and target question results in strengthened priming at the latest stages of processing. These results replicate previous findings at the single-word level but do so within sentential contexts, which has implications both for accounts of priming via automatic spreading activation as well as for accounts of persistence attested in spontaneous speech corpora.

Crossmodal Nonspatial Repetition Inhibition Due to Modality Shift

Previous studies have found that processing of a second stimulus is slower when the modality of the first stimulus differs, which is termed the modality shift effect. Moreover, people tend to respond more slowly to the second stimulus when the two stimuli are similar in the semantic dimension, which is termed the nonspatial repetition inhibition effect. This study aimed to explore the modality shift effect on nonspatial repetition inhibition and whether such modulation was influenced by different temporal intervals. A cue–target paradigm was adopted in which modality priming and identity priming were manipulated at three interstimuli intervals. The results showed that the response times under the modality shift condition were slower than those under the modality repeat condition. In trials with modality shift, responses to congruent cues and targets were slower than to incongruent cue–target combinations, indicating crossmodal nonspatial repetition inhibition. The crossmodal nonspatial repetition inhibition effect decreased with increasing interstimuli interval. These results provide evidence that the additional intervening event proposed in previous studies is not necessary for the occurrence of crossmodal nonspatial repetition inhibition.

Letter connectedness and Arabic visual word recognition

This study investigates the processing consequences of letter connectedness during Arabic visual word recognition. Specifically, this study examined (a) whether there is a processing cost associated with letter connectedness during word-level reading and (b) whether this factor modulates form-level activation among words during lexical access. Experiment 1 tested one-, two-, and three-chunk Arabic words and nonwords in a lexical decision task with masked identity priming. Experiment 2 tested the same stimuli in a lexical decision task with masked form priming, in which prime–target pairs differed by a letter associated with the morphological root. In both experiments, there was a clear processing cost for letter connectedness—one-chunk words had longer processing times than two-chunk words, which had longer processing times than three-chunk words. Comparable processing time differences were also found for nonwords, suggesting that letter connectedness influences Arabic word recognition at a prelexical orthographic processing stage. Furthermore, although reliable priming was found in both the experiments, there was a suggestion that letter connectedness modulated form priming effects (Experiment 2), with the strongest effect for three-chunk word targets. These findings are taken to indicate that letter connectedness is an important factor that should be considered—and controlled for—in examinations of Arabic visual word recognition.