What Triggers Customer Curiosity? Exploring the Role of Branded Content Experience Design in Customer Response
by Seonjeong (Ally) Lee
When was the last time you checked a post on social media? Social media has become part of our daily lives, serving as an important communication channel. Companies create and post branded content on social media due to its benefits, such as lowering advertising costs, expanding information exchanges, and strengthening customer relationships. Stories, pictures, videos, and/or customer reviews can be posted on social media. Branded content provides information, entertainment, and/or social connection to communicate the values of a brand. A branded content experience occurs through an interaction between a customer and a brand-related image/video/text on a social media platform. Even though a variety of branded content is available on social media, not all branded content triggers customer curiosity. Curiosity becomes the ultimate key in interacting with branded content as getting customers’ attention is the first step in initiating customer-brand relationships on social media. It is valuable to explore customers’ branded content experiences to better understand how customers process branded content on social media.
Companies need to be mindful of fulfilling customers’ experiences while delivering their intended brand messages to customers. This study explores the effects of branded content experiences on customers’ psychological and behavioral responses. Using, an online survey for customers who have stayed at a hotel within the previous 12 months, results advocate the importance of creating different types of branded content experiences to prompt customer curiosity in the hotel social media context. Findings of this study identify utilitarian, social bonding and aesthetic branded content experiences positively influence customers’ curiosity, which then guides customers’ engagement with the hotel brand and purchase intentions. Customers show favorable responses when they are exposed to social media content that fulfills their information-seeking desires, is visually appealing, and creates social interaction experiences. Based on these findings, hotel managers can take various branded content strategies. Information about in-room amenities, general travel tips, hotel experiences, and local attractions can be posted on a hotel’s social media platforms to generate customers’ branded content experiences. Also, aesthetically appealing branded content, such as dynamic and visually appealing branded assets, can be posted on a hotel’s social media to grab customers’ curiosity. Moreover, different avenues can be created for customers to join virtual communities where they can share information and connect with others based on common interests on a hotel’s social media platforms.
Extending curiosity stimuli from an advertising context to a social media context, this study explores how branded content experiences can trigger customer curiosity. Even though various factors, such as incomplete or ambiguous information, are identified as curiosity-triggering cues, motivating factors and outcomes of customer curiosity have not been investigated with branded content. Findings of this study also provide useful guidelines to effectively design branded content experiences. Customers tend to search for more information about the hotel to fill their curiosity gap when engaging with aesthetically branded content. Designing effective branded content is important on social media as customers’ branded content experiences can eventually contribute to a better hotel performance through customers’ brand engagement and their purchase behaviors.
Article Details
What Triggers Customer Curiosity? Exploring the Role of Branded Content Experience Design on Customer Response
Seonjeong (Ally) Lee
First Published January 3, 2024 Research Article
DOI: 10.1177/10963480231220274
Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Research
About the Author
