Women reporters are underrepresented in newsrooms and assigned to gender-stereotypic roles, but to what effect? To better understand the role of gender in news making, this article utilizes three ...survey experiments to investigate the effects of journalists’ gender on reader perceptions toward reporter credibility, outlet credibility, and the relevance of news to them. We find little evidence that readers doubt the credibility of a reporter or a news outlet based on the gender of a reporter, the gender of the source, or the gendered nature of the issue. Our findings have implications for media credibility and newsroom diversity.
•This meta-analysis addresses credibility concerns for online health information.•A collection of empirical studies addressing user-generated content was analyzed.•We synthesized 22 effect sizes ...drawn from empirical studies of 1346 participants.•Source credibility had no influence on perceived information credibility.•The platform where the information was posted might be a contingent factor.
The present study provides a meta-analysis of perceived credibility concerns for user-generated-online-health information. Past work yields inconsistent findings regarding whether high credible versus low credible sources would relate to perceived credibility of online health information. A collection of empirical studies was synthesized to reach an explanation of the conflicting findings. Analysis of 22 effect sizes with 1346 participants indicated that source credibility had no significant overall influence on perceived information credibility (r=0.03, n.s.). However, the variances across the studies suggest that the platform where the information was posted might be a contingent factor. Specifically, when user-generated health information was posted on a common website, high credible sources were significantly related to high perceived information credibility.
Purpose
This paper aims to explore the role of source credibility while purchasing environment-friendly products using Ajzen’s (1991) theory of planned behavior as underpinning model.
...Design/methodology/approach
The proposed theoretical model was empirically tested with the data collected from 334 respondents using structural equation modeling.
Findings
The results gave empirical support to the addition of source credibility to the original theory of planned. Moreover, consumer attitude was found mediating the effect of corporations’ credibility on purchase intention. Also, attitude and perceived behavioral control were found as the most important predictors of consumer’s intention to purchase environment-friendly products.
Practical implications
This study provides valuable insights for the marketers engaged in sustainable business practices. Amid, ever-increasing carbon emission, promoting the use of environment-friendly products has become the need of the time. Credibility plays a crucial role while promoting and communicating an organization’s sustainable practices among its stakeholders including consumers. Therefore, the marketer should formulate appropriate marketing communication strategy to communicate the consumer about the green practices and environment-friendly products they produce. The results suggest that corporation’s credibility shapes consumer attitude and influences intention to purchase environment-friendly products. Earning trust of the consumer is pivotal to achieve success in the market. Therefore, results may help the marketers to better understand consumer’s response toward their marketing strategies and further convince and persuade them to buy their products.
Social implications
The findings of this study may be useful for marketers, strategists, policymakers and government while formulating promotional strategies to make consumer aware, educate and persuade them to purchase products which do not cause harm to the environment.
Originality/value
The study is novel in terms of exploring role of source credibility and extending theory of planned behavior in the context of sustainable consumption.
Purpose
The ever-growing popularity of social media platforms is evidence of consumers engaging emotionally with these brands. Given the prominence of social media in society, the purpose of this ...paper is to understand social media platforms from a “brand” perspective through examining the effect of consumers’ emotional attachment on social media consumer-based brand equity (CBBE).
Design/methodology/approach
This paper develops a model that outlines how emotional brand attachment with social media explains social media CBBE via shaping consumer perceptions of brand credibility and consumer satisfaction. An online survey of 340 Australian social media consumers provided data for empirical testing. The inclusion of multiple context-relevant covariates and use of a method-variance-adjusted data matrix, as well as an examination of an alternative model, adds robustness to the results.
Findings
The findings of this paper support the conceptual model, and the authors identify strong relationships between the focal variables. A phantom model analysis explicates specific indirect effects of emotional brand attachment on CBBE. The authors also find support for a fully mediated effect of emotional brand attachment on social media brand equity. Further, they broaden the nomological network of emotional brand attachment, outlining key outcomes.
Research limitations/implications
This paper offers a conceptual mechanism (a chain-of-effects) of how consumer emotional brand attachment with social media brands translates into social media CBBE. It also finds that a brand’s credibility as well as its ability to perform against consumer expectations (i.e. satisfaction) are equally effective in translating emotional brand attachment into social media CBBE.
Practical implications
Social media brands are constantly challenged by rapid change and ongoing criticism over such issues as data privacy. The implications from this paper suggest that managers should make investments in creating (reinforcing) emotional connections with social media consumers, as this will favorably impact CBBE by way of a relational mechanism, that is, via enhancing credibility and consumer satisfaction.
Social implications
Lately, social media in general has suffered from a crisis of trust in society. The enhanced credibility of social media brands resulting from consumers’ emotional attachments will potentially serve to enhance its acceptance as a credible form of media in society.
Originality/value
Social media platforms are often examined as brand-building platforms. This paper adopts a different perspective, examining social media platforms as brands per se and the effects of emotional attachments that consumers develop towards these. This paper offers valuable insights into how consumers’ emotional attachments drive vital brand judgments such as credibility and satisfaction, ultimately culminating into social media CBBE.
Organizational credibility is an important component of organizational survival. The need to build and maintain organizational credibility in the social media context is specifically significant, ...largely due to the popularity of the medium in the current interactive communication environment. Social media, however, create a challenging environment for accurate information consumption, because it excludes the journalistic gatekeeper, are subject to misinformation and allow for information proliferation by both official and nonofficial users. For organizations to enhance their credibility in the social media context, it is important, firstly, to determine what constitutes social organization credibility. To establish an enhanced understanding of social organizational credibility and to build towards a formal conceptualization, this article quantitatively explored the preliminary identified determinants of social organizational credibility among active social media users. An exploratory factor analysis indicated that social organizational credibility consists of the determinants of trustworthiness, qualified resonance, homophily, personable interaction, informed conversation, and apt social word-of-mouth. Furthermore, the results also highlighted that an organization’s connections (including social media influencers and experts) are also a key determinant of social organizational credibility. This research provides guidance as to how social media users assess an organization’s credibility in the social media context, which could help alleviate the misinformation stigma that is associated with social media as an interactive communication platform. The identified determinants and the conceptualization of social organizational credibility extend existing organizational credibility literature and provide organizations with much needed guidelines to enhance their credibility in the social media context.
The International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) and the South African King III Report on Governance emphasize the role of corporate governance in preparing a high-quality integrated report and ...establishing an appropriate credibility-enhancing process. This paper examines the significance of corporate governance mechanisms in explaining variations in the quality of integrated reports and the extent and quality of credibility-enhancing mechanisms (CEMs) for integrated reports. Using a sample of integrated reports published between 2012 and 2015 by listed companies on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, this study finds that traditional governance mechanisms such as the board and the audit committee are positively related to the reporting quality of and use of CEMs. In addition, sustainability-oriented corporate governance mechanisms (i.e. sustainability committee and the use of non-financial performance measures in executives' compensation contracts) have an incremental positive effect on both the quality of and the extent and quality of CEMs on integrated reports. Additional analyses attribute the positive effect of these corporate governance mechanisms on quality and the use of CEMs mainly to the diligence and expertise of the board of directors and audit committee and the independence and expertise of a sustainability committee.
Consumer perceptions of brand motives related to corporate environmental responsibility affect the decisions of both corporations and consumers. Yet prior literature has typically viewed these firm ...motives as dichotomous, either solely intrinsic or solely extrinsic. The authors argue for a novel approach to positioning sustainability motives, where the brand communicates both intrinsic and extrinsic benefits together, as a joint motive. With a joint motive, a brand can highlight how an effort can benefit both planet and business with a “doing well by doing good” approach. Across five experiments, including a field study on Facebook, this research investigates the positive impact of the joint motive and its ability to enhance the credibility of sustainable initiatives via heightened perceptions of trustworthiness and expertise. Results provide converging evidence for the benefits of presenting a joint motive for sustainability efforts with implications for policy and practice.
Research has long highlighted the importance of complainant credibility in influencing sexual assault (SA) case outcomes. Despite these findings, few studies have investigated the police decision to ...question a complainant’s credibility. This study uses data on SAs reported to the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) in 2008 to address this issue, specifically focusing on the effects of rape culture. Results suggest that indicators of “real rape” and measures of complainant “character flaws” influence the likelihood that an officer will question a complainant’s credibility. Notably, all indicators measuring officer perceptions of complainant “character flaws”—whether reputation issues were present, the complainant suffered from mental health issues, her testimony was inconsistent, and if the officer believed she had a motive to lie—increased the likelihood that the police would question her credibility. Practical implications, theoretical advancements, and directions for future research are discussed.
Drawing on stimulus-organism-response theory, the current paper was an investigation of the associations among a celebrity endorser's credibility and brand affection, self-brand connection, and ...purchase intention along with how parasocial relationships moderate these emotion-based associations. Data from 299 Korean millennials were tested applying structural equation modeling and multi-group methods. The findings indicated that celebrity endorser's credibility positively correlated with brand affection and self-brand connection and that they were in turn, associated with purchase intention. Furthermore, both brand affection and self-brand connection fully mediated the impact of celebrity endorser's credibility on intention to purchase. Parasocial relationships moderated the influence on self-brand connection but not on brand affection. More precisely, the impact on self-brand connection was stronger with more parasocial relationships. The theoretical and practical contributions arising from these results are discussed.
