ENTER2017 eTourism Conference presentation

1. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 1
The Role of Humour in Driving
Customer Engagement
Jing Ge
Laboratory for Intelligent Systems in Tourism, USA
jingge@mkt-ai.com
Ulrike Gretzel
Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism
University of Southern California, USA
gretzel@usc.edu

2. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 2
Humour in Marketing
Communication
• Humour plays an important role in enhancing marketing communication efforts.
• Marketing messages involving humour are able to:
 draw consumer attention, increase message comprehension and contribute to
positive attitudes toward these messages (Eisend, 2011).
 disclose difficult information and establish rapport by entertaining consumers
(McGraw, Warren, & Kan, 2015).
 develop a well-regarded brand image and build strong relationships with
consumers (Speck, 1990)
 initiate interactions with both familiar and unfamiliar audiences (e.g. existing and
potential customers) (Lynch, 2002).

3. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 3
Humour in Tourism
Marketing
• Humour has been found to be especially effective in the tourism context due to the
hedonic nature of tourism products (Pearce & Pabel, 2015).
• Consumers tend to concentrate more on tourism marketing messages involving humour
(Pearce & Pabel, 2015).
• Humorous tourist postcards and brochures are more likely to be disseminated.
• Destinations presented in humorous advertising can generate more discussion among
tourists and increase tourists’ willingness to visit the destination (Pearce & Pabel, 2015).

4. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 4
Humour in Social Media
Marketing
• The capability of humour to initiate social interactions makes it potentially a very powerful
tool in the context of social media marketing.
• Humour plays a critical role in the effectiveness of social media marketing efforts, which is
typically judged by the level of customer engagement achieved.
• Marketing posts involving humour are ranked as the top reason that consumers are willing
to interact with firms on social media (Nielsen, 2015).
• Marketing promotions on social media through humour can generate large amounts of
reposts in a short time period (Northrup, 2015).

5. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 5
Research Problem
• Humour structure and use capabilities and conventions on social media differ
from those in traditional media.
• The technological basis of social media not only accommodates humour
morphologies facilitated by traditional media, but also affords new ones
(Shifman, 2012).
• Findings from previous studies on the effectiveness of humour in marketing can
not necessarily be directly transferred to the social media context.
• Although the effectiveness of humour in digital contexts is generally assumed to
be high (Shifman, Coleman, & Ward, 2007), evidence derived from systematic,
empirical research is generally lacking.

6. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 6
Research Question
• To fill this literature gap, this research aims at answering the following question:
What is the relative importance of humour in
driving customer engagement with tourism
marketing messages on social media?

7. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 7
Theoretical Foundations
Customer
Engagement Metrics
Humour
Social Media Context
Product
Focus
Message
Complexity

8. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 8
Customer Engagement Metrics
• Customer engagement is defined as the sum of customers’ behavioural manifestations
that have a firm focus, reach beyond purchase-related interactions and are the result of
strong motivational drivers (Van Doorn et al., 2010).
• Customer engagement is typically measured using likes, comments and shares (Coelho,
Oliveira, Almeida, & O'Connor, 2016).
• Given the unequal value of likes, comments and shares, weighted engagement metrics are
typically used (Margetts, 2013).
Table 1. Social Media Metrics (adapted from Coelho et. al., 2016)
Primary
Metrics
Description
Liking Endorsing firm-initiated posts.
Visible on firm’s social media page.
Commenting Adding information to firm-initiated posts.
Structuring firm–customer conversation by either
maintaining, challenging or redirecting.
Visible on firm’s social media page. e.
Reposting Spreading firm-initiated posts.
Expanding firm–customer conversation.
Visible on firm’s social media page and on customer’s
personal page.

9. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 9
Humour
• Humour is defined as a rhetorical device included in a message to persuade the audience
(Meyer, 2000).
• A rhetorical device refers to a linguistic mechanism, which, in the case of humour,
manufactures for instance a play on language to create a non-literal meaning (Weaver,
2010).
• Previous research suggests humour is able to initiate different kinds of audience
responses:
 laughing or smiling or at least smirking or winking (Knight, 2008)
 sharing as diffusion; sharing as participation; sharing as communication (Brown, Bhadury,
& Pope, 2010; Shifman, 2012).
• H1. Humour posts lead to more customer engagement than non-humour posts.

10. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 10
Product Focus
• Based on use and gratification theory, firm-generated online posts are identified as
product and non-product categories (Brennan et al., 2015):
 Product category includes informational and remuneration posts
 Non-product category consists of entertainment and social posts
• Studies have shown that non-product posts can exhibit high levels of engagement,
including commenting, liking and sharing (Brennan et al., 2015; Coelho et al., 2016; De
Vries, Gensler, & Leeflang, 2012; Kwok & Yu, 2013; Luarn et al., 2015).
• H2. Product-related posts lead to less engagement than non-product posts.

11. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 11
Message Complexity
• Online post complexity focuses on three constructs: post length, lexical density and
multimodality.
• Lengthy messages with too much information may confuse consumers, discourage their
willingness to consume the information and lead to negative effects (Akdeniz, Calantone,
& Voorhees, 2013).
• Texts with a high lexical density deliver compact information that poses challenges for
reading comprehension (Fang, 2005).
• Online posts delivered through multimodal forms of text (e.g. photo, video, text)
negatively influence generating customer comments, reposts and likes, because they take
customers a longer time to view and understand (Luarn, Lin, & Chiu, 2015).
• H3. High message complexity leads to less engagement.

12. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 12
Proposed Theoretical
Model
Humour
-
+
Product Focus
Engagement
(Weighted)Complexity
Length
Lexical Density
Multimodality
-

13. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 13
Research Context
Chinese social media
•Weibo
– Firm-customer interactions
– Humour culture
Tourism
•Chinese DMOs actively engaged on Weibo
Are you experiencing this situation?

14. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 14
Sample Selection
• To select the case, one of the authors subscribed to all provincial and autonomous
DMOs with a Weibo presence and followed all activities for two weeks.
• Shandong DMO emerged as the most active and advanced user of Weibo and
therefore represented the best case for this study.
• Single case allows for control of other factors (e.g. type of destination, number and
type of followers).

15. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 15
Data Collection
• 100 humour posts and 100 non-humour posts along with consumer response
metrics including liking, commenting and reposting were selected.
• Data was collected through two phases:
Phase 1 Selecting firm-initiated postsPhase 1 Selecting firm-initiated posts
Step 1: Selecting all firm-initiated posts over the course of one month, starting
September 10, 2014 (n=301).
Step 2: Removing irrelevant post which are repostings of customer-initiated posts
Phase 2 Selecting firm-initiated humour postsPhase 2 Selecting firm-initiated humour posts
Firms
Step 1: Selecting humour posts by looking at the linguistic characteristics;
Step 2: Confirming humour posts through an online survey (n=112 Weibo users)
Step 4: Clarifying issues with graduate students;
Step 5: Removing ambiguous posts (n=15).

16. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 16
Data Coding
• Adopt the weighted engagement formula used by Unmetric.com (likes + 5 x
comments + 10 x reposts). The average weighted engagement was 539
(minimum 34 and maximum 2187).
• With respect to the independent variables, the posts had to be coded to
reflect whether they contained humour, a product focus and three aspects of
complexity (i.e. length, lexical density and multimodality).
• Product focus coding if informational/remuneration content (expert coder +
2nd
coder for confirmation); length = # of Chinese characters counted with
Chinese Microsoft Word; modalities coded were: written text, static image,
moving image, video, emoticon, hashtags and brackets.
• Lexical density is measured as the number of lexical terms divided by the
total number of words per post (De Ascaniis & Gretzel, 2012). Lexical terms
were identified based on Wu and Zou (2009) and the coding was confirmed
by a Chinese linguistics expert.

17. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 17
Data Analysis
• Length and lexical density were recoded into categorical variables
using the means as cut-off points.
• The data were analysed using the general linear model procedure in
SPSS with weighted engagement as the dependent variable and
humour, product focus, multi-modality, length and density as the
factors.
• Interaction effects were not modelled as there was no theoretical
support for them.

18. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 18
Descriptive Results
• 200 posts, 100 humour posts
• Posts had an average of 26 likes (minimum 3 and maximum 197), 48 reposts
(minimum 2 and maximum 164), and 7 comments (minimum 0 and
maximum 70).
• 54.5% of the posts had a product focus; correlation product-focus/humour
significant but weak (.271) and in unexpected direction: 68% of humour
posts actually have a product/destination focus compared to 41% of non-
humour posts.
• on average 82 characters long, with the minimum being 10 and the
maximum 140.
• included on average 59 lexical terms, with a minimum of 8 and a maximum
of 114. The lexical density varied between 14.4% and 91.9%, with the
average lexical density being 71.2%.
• 2.5% of the posts are text-only, 37.5% contain at least one multimodal
element, 43% contain 2 additional elements, 16.5% contain 3 and only 1
post (0.5%) contains 4 additional elements. On average, posts contained
1.75 elements.

19. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 19
Model Results
•Humour was identified as a significant predictor (F=17.9; p<.001), with humour posts
encouraging consumers to engage more (Mean humour post = 587.3; Mean non-humour
post = 490.6).
•Product focus emerged as the strongest driver of engagement (F=36.8; p<.001), with
non-product posts achieving higher levels (Mean non-product posts = 716.3 vs. product
posts = 390.87).
•Post length negatively influences engagement (F=5.0; p<.05; Mean for below average
length posts = 591.5; above average length = 496.8).
•As for multimodality – the more elements a post contains, the less engaging it is (F=3.0;
p<.05) (Text only Mean = 1,112.0; Text +1 = 627.4; Text +2 = 465.1; Text + 3 = 456.2; Text
+4 = 124).
•No significant influence was found for lexical density.

20. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 20
Discussion & Conclusion
• The results of this research support the idea that tourism marketers can encourage
customer engagement on social media by developing marketing messages with a
specific content and structure.
• The implications derived from the first hypothesis (i.e. humour posts lead to more
customer engagement than non-humour posts):
 The confirmation approves the notion that humour can be used as an effective
communication tool to stimulate interactions (Meyer, 2000).
 Given the significant role of customer engagement in the tourism context (So et al.,
2014), this result also supports the idea that humour may assist tourism marketers to
have delighted customers and maybe even fans, permitting high levels of emotional
bonds and relational exchange (Sashi, 2012).

21. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 21
# 开心一刻 # 即使吵架，他（她）也依然爱你 , 夫妻没有隔夜的仇，起来给他（她）做顿可口的早餐吧！
#Fun time# Despite fighting, he or she still loves you. There is no overnight hatred between a
couple, get up and make him or her a breakfast.
Example: Firm-initiated humour post

22. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 22
• The implication derived from the second hypothesis (i.e. product-related posts lead to
less engagement than non-product posts):
 The confirmation supports the idea that social media create a new marketing
paradigm with a distinctive culture – it requires tourism marketers to deliver content
relating to every aspect of consumer life (Chathoth et al., 2016) and to avoid hard
advertising and selling (Gretzel & Yoo, 2013).
 Result confirms that social media relationships with DMOs reach beyond functional
benefits (Gretzel & Fesenmaier, 2012).
 This result also underpins the notion that non-product posts may assist marketers to
speak to loyal customers, which permits a high level of relational exchange (Sashi,
2012).
 It also offers tourism marketers insight in terms of how to develop product-related
posts endorsed by consumers. For instance, they can integrate social or entertaining
elements into the posts promoting products and services.

23. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 23
幸福就是不用设置明天起床的闹钟！同感的转走！！
​​​​Getting up without the use of alarm clock is a form of happiness. Please repost if you
feel the same way.
Example: Firm-initiated non-product post

24. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 24
• The implication derived from the third hypothesis (i.e. message complexity leads to
less engagement):
 The confirmation emphasizes that online posts, which are planned to generate
consumer responses, need to be designed in a way that they can be processed quickly
and easily (Trefzger et al., 2015).
 This result also reminds tourism marketers that, although multimodal forms of text
allow them to overcome the constraint of word limitations on social media, they still
need to select appropriate elements based on the specific marketing communication
goal and keep the message simple.

25. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 25
Theoretical
Contributions
Humour:
•expand the use of humour in the tourism literature by adding a new application area.
•broaden the current humour literature in tourism mainly focused on Western humour by
introducing humour-related concepts in a Chinese social media context.
Affordances:
•offer insight into social media affordances and their linguistic relevance.
Social media marketing in tourism:
•confirm that effective engagement depends on not only message content but also
message structure.
•affirm that marketing on social media is indeed very different from traditional marketing
and requires a rethinking of approaches and of the overall marketing mindset.

26. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 26
Limitations & Future
Research
Limitations:
•This research focuses on one social media platform (i.e. Sina Weibo)
•The single case study method allowed for a look at the focal factors in isolation
but limits the generalizability of the results.
•Although this study identified that humour posts lead to more engagement, it is
not clear if humour posts always surpass non-humour ones.
Future research:
•investigate other platforms such as WeChat.
•examine whether the discovered effects hold true across DMOs with different
follower contingents and destination brands.
•identify humour effects in positive and negative posts through comparative
research
•identify additional factors that possibly drive weighted engagement.