Date: 06 December 2024, Friday
Time: 13.30 – 14.30
“Standing Out while Fitting In: Visual Rightness of Text Overlays in Social Media Communication”
by
Francisco Villarroel Ordenes
University of Bologna
This is an online seminar. To request event details please send a message to department.
Abstract:
The vast amount of content on social media platforms makes it extremely challenging to get posts noticed. An increasingly popular approach to increase engagement relies on text overlays (TOs), such that text is inserted within the visual space of an image. Such practices raise questions about how the separate features should be emphasized, prompting the current investigation into how and why salient features of the TO and images should be combined for effective consumer engagement.
Three fundamental characteristics, commonly used by practitioners, are salient and can trigger engagement: the degree of dynamism or implied motion in images and the size and centrality of the TO. With multiple methods, including field studies, online experiments, and managerial interviews, the authors consistently establish that a TO that is too large and placed centrally, combined with dynamic images, has negative effects on consumer engagement, due to diminished perceptions of visual rightness. That is, consumers regard the social media composition as visually unattractive and its formal execution as suboptimal. By leveraging these findings, the authors develo
p a new app to help managers compose more engaging multimodal social media posts.
Bio :
Dr. Francisco Villarroel Ordenes (PhD. in Marketing, Maastricht University) is a Full Professor of Marketing at the University of Bologna. Francisco has experience teaching the courses Branding, Social Media Marketing, Performance Marketing, Analytics, and Text Mining, at the Bachelor, Master’s and PhD level. His research revolves around the themes of branding, customer experience, and digital marketing, and it has been published in leading journals including the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Service Research, Journal of Retailing, among others. He currently serves on the editorial review boards of the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Retailing, the Journal of Service Research, and the Journal of Business Research.