The Antecedents and Consequences of Social‐Media Engagement With A Sustainability‐Advertisement

Abstract

The success of brands' sustainability-related promotion largely depends on consumers' opinions, which they usually share on social media. The objective of this study is to examine the influence of users' opinions about sustainability related social-media posts (i.e., positive or negative captions) on subsequent social-media engagement and purchase intentions for the advertised products. A 2 × 2 between-subject experiment with 279 respondents in the UK reveals that positive captions elicit a higher level of self-transformative consumption vision and subsequent emotional response than negative captions. This leads to higher social-media engagement with the sustainability-ad and purchase intentions. A significant interaction effect was observed between the types of captions and source expertise on social-media engagement. Although the skewness in the respondents' demographics may limit generalisability, those variables were not significant as control variables. This paper contributes to the sustainability-advertisement literature by considering social-media engagement as both an antecedent and an outcome. This paper offers managers a comprehensive understanding of the process of forming consumers' purchase intention for sustainable products by incorporating self-transformative consumption-vision theory, the pleasure-arousal-dominance theory of emotion, and social influence theory.