Does brand name matter in social media marketing? The interaction effect of brand name and ranking on behavior intention: a case of business school students in the US Midwest

ABSTRACT

This study examines the interplay of university brand name and ranking on behavior intention in both social media (e.g. Facebook) and traditional media (e.g. Magazine) contexts. One pre-test and two experiments were performed to test the interaction effect of brand name and raking on behavior intention and the underlying mechanism of the effect with the sample of US business school students in the Midwest. The findings demonstrate that brand name does not matter very much in lower-ranking universities. But in higher-ranking universities, brand name adaptation leads to higher behavior intention. In addition, the mediation test demonstrates that processing fluency (pronunciation fluency and meaning fluency) is the underlying mechanism to determine the behavior intention. In traditional media (e.g. magazine) context, the processing fluency effect is more dominant in lower-ranking university brands. Several theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media marketing
• university brand name
• university brand ranking
• processing fluency

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).