Examining the Effect of Branded versus Unbranded Content Strategy: The Moderating Role of Self-Construal

Abstract

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In recent years, social media has been consistently used in companies’ marketing strategies to cultivate brand trust and drive revenue growth. Among the numerous different content types, there are two distinctive content types that have been discussed by current industry experts, which include the ‘branded content’ which centers on promoting the brand and its products, and the ‘unbranded content’ which focuses on caring and building longer relationships with the customers. As means to incorporate the above two content types into the whole company’s content strategies, current industry has suggested a ‘80/20 content strategy’ that entails to allocate 80% of unbranded posts and only 20% for brand’s promotional purposes. Though its positive implications have been widely discussed and encouraged, barely any implementations of the ‘80/20 content strategy’ have been found, and therefore, thorough research is essential to address the effectiveness of the proposed strategy toward the company's objectives. This study investigates how different content strategies (i.e., 80/20 versus 20/80 content strategy) affect brand trust and customers' purchase intentions. Furthermore, this study underscores the importance of self-construal in affecting the whole process. Through an experiment (287 participants), we show that though ‘80/20 content strategy’ versus the ‘20/80 content strategy’ does not significantly exhibit higher customers’ purchase intentions, the ‘80/20 content strategy’ is found to significantly affects purchase intentions through the activation of customers’ perceived brand benevolence. Meanwhile, the ‘20/80 content strategy’ is found to activate customers’ perceived brand competence, thereby influencing their purchase intentions. By adding self-construal into the analysis, we found that customers with interdependent self-construal exhibit higher perceived brand benevolence that leads to their purchase intentions when exposed with the 80/20 content strategy compared to the 20/80 content strategy. Conversely, those with independent self- construal exhibit higher perceived brand competence that also leads to their purchase intentions when exposed with the 20/80 content strategy versus the 80/20 content strategy. As a result, this study has enlightened the importance of branded and unbranded content implementations in the social media realm, and further provided deeper insights toward the effectiveness and usage of different content strategies by different companies. This study also marks the first experiment to incorporate the effects of branded or unbranded content and their respective strategies toward brand trust and purchase intentions within different customers’ self-construal, which provides valuable insight toward the social media marketing practices.