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Amassing an audience by blogging is a very recent form of online consumer behavior. Consumers not only seek community as earlier studies show, they also look for taste leadership from certain peers Fashion bloggers take hold of the Internet “megaphone” to broadcast and influence taste within an elaborate social and cultural process. It teaches us some general principles about the ways professional marketing is affected by these “citizen journalists” on social media, and how their behavior is affected by marketers. These megaphone-holding consumers have real power, and their consumer-to-consumer relationships depend upon brands. Brands are increasingly coming to depend upon them as well. Although these bloggers started out as ordinary consumers, they were soon integrated into the professional fashion system and do not oppose it. They therefore pose no threat to professional marketers, but rather offer an alternative marketing opportunity within the complex web of social media.

In this collection of short, invited essays on the topic of marketing (as) rhetoric we deal with a variety of issues that demonstrate the centrality of rhetoric and rhetorical considerations to the pursuit of marketing scholarship, research and practice. Stephen Brown examines the enduring rhetorical power of the 4Ps; Chris Hackley argues for the critical power of rhetorical orientations in marketing scholarship but cautions us on the need to work harder in conceptually connecting rhetorical theory and modern marketing frameworks; Shelby Hunt explains how rhetorical processes are incorporated in his inductive realist model of theory generation, using one of his most successful publications as an illustration; Charles Marsh demonstrates what Isocrates' broad rhetorical project has to teach us about the importance of reputation cultivation in modern marketing; Nicholas O'Shaughnessy uses an analysis of Trump's discourse to argue that political marketing as it is currently conceived is ill-equipped to engage effectively with the rhetorical force of Trump's 'unmarketing'; Barbara Phillips uses Vygotsky's work on imagination to investigate the important of pleasure and play in advertising rhetoric; and finally, David Tonks, who in many ways started it all, reiterates the need for marketers to recognise the strength of the relationship between marketing and persuasion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social Media Influencers (SMIs) are micro‐celebrities with large followings on social media platforms who engage consumers and hold the potential to promote customer‐brand relationships across different product categories. SMIs have an existing relationship of trust with consumers, and consumers seek out the content created by SMIs for valuable information and advice. This study explores the process of brand engagement between consumers and brands in the digital content marketing environment, specifically examining the research question: Do SMIs act as a route to brand engagement for their followers? The context for this study is the beauty community on YouTube; over 60,000 user comments were analyzed through automated text analysis. This study is among the first to provide empirical evidence that SMIs do act as a route to brand engagement through the three dimensions of cognitive processing, affection and activation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All forms of personification draw on anthropomorphism, the propensity to attribute human characteristics to objects. In an experiment, we show that visual personification—pictures in an ad that metaphorically represent a product as engaged in some kind of human behavior—can trigger anthropomorphism. Such personification, when embedded in an ad, appears to lead to more positive emotions, more positive attributions of brand personality, and greater brand liking. Implications for advertisers are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From Mr. Peanut to the GEICO gecko, spokes-characters have been a consistently used promotional tool across time; previous research demonstrates that between the 1950s and 1990s, spokes-character use remained stable at 7% of all print ads targeted at adults. Our study investigates whether spokes-characters are still a prevalent strategy used by advertisers to engage modern consumers. In total, 922 ads collected from men's and women's magazines indicate that the use of spokes-characters significantly increased over the past 20 years; the types of characters featured also have undergone changes. Interpretations of these findings discuss historical changes as potential facilitators of this increasingly used advertising tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]