Key Takeaways:
- The brand selfie is an emerging phenomenon on social media, more common than consumer selfies for brand images.
- While consumer selfies attract more likes and comments, brand selfies attract better brand engagement and purchase intentions.
- Brands that assess their social media campaigns based on likes and comments should consider shifting their strategy, focusing instead on brand engagement rather than post-engagement.
One of the biggest trends introduced by smartphone cameras and social media are selfies. According to some estimates, individual millennial users will take more than 25,000 selfies in their lifetime, and more than 450 million images with the hashtag #selfie have been posted on Instagram. But how do selfies impact brand marketing?
Oded Netzer, the Arthur J. Samberg Professor of Business at Columbia Business School, wanted to explore how user-generated images impact brand engagement.
“Initially, the inspiration for this study was to get a descriptive view of how consumer brands appear on social media,” he says. Netzer and his co-researchers observed three types of images. The first two were the types of images they expected: packshots, or standalone images of the product, and consumer selfies, or images that included a user’s face. “But we were surprised to see that a substantial proportion of images — over 20 percent — appeared as a consumer holding the brand without showing their face.”
To describe those images, the researchers coined the term brand selfie. “We were drawn to this type of image, first because it was novel relative to the traditional image formats often used in advertising,” Netzer says. “Second, seeing the brand from the point of view of the viewer struck us as an effective view for the brand, since the viewer could almost imagine they are holding the brand themselves. We hypothesized that these images will generate strong consumer response toward the brand.”
How the research was done: To understand the impact of these distinct types of branded images, Netzer and his co-researchers used machine learning image analysis and language models to infer social media response to more than a quarter-million brand image posts on Twitter and Instagram, assessing the type of brand image and which images were more likely to lead other users to buy the product.
They had to start with training an algorithm to identify the different image types. “There were some unique challenges with the image recognition machine learning model we trained,” Netzer says. “For example, because only about 10 percent of the brand selfie posts had people holding the product with their left hand, it was originally harder for the algorithm to detect brand selfies when the consumers held the brand with their left hand. To resolve the issue, we mirrored every image and used both the original and the mirror image in the training such that the number of right- and left-handed selfies was equal.”
The researchers also met a unique hurdle when training the language model: “One challenge was to capture a complex behavior like purchase intent in the comments to the social media post,” Netzer says. “A consumer can have a purchase intent without using obvious words like purchase or buy and without mentioning the brand itself. They can simply say, ‘Where can I get it?’ or ‘I want it so badly.’” To address this issue, the researchers used 5,000 human-annotated posts for purchase intent and trained a machine learning transformer model to identify them with a high level of accuracy.
What the researchers found: The research showed that while consumer-selfie images receive more sender engagement such as likes and comments, brand selfies result in more brand engagement.
The good news is that the social media landscape already leans toward brand selfies. “The most surprising result to us was that there are more brand selfies than consumer selfies,” says Netzer. “Despite the popularity of selfies on social media, which even changed the way cameras are built, consumers appear to be reluctant to take a selfie of their face with a brand. On the other hand, they were more than twice as likely to take a brand selfie featuring the brand in their own hand but without their face in the image. And these brand selfies were even more effective for the brands.”
Why the research matters: The research can help brands reimagine what success on social media looks like. “Brands often use simple metrics such as likes and comments on posts in which the brands appear,” says Netzer. “However, we find that these metrics may be too simplistic and miss the focus for the brand. Likes and comments are often targeted at the user, not the brand. Brand should be focused on measures like mention of the brand and purchase intent, which appear more frequently in brand selfies.”
This reveals a more foundational challenge in social media marketing. “There is a competition between the poster and the brand,” Netzer points out. “Posters seek engagement in the form of likes and comments, which is commonly achieved by consumer selfies that shift focus away from the brand. However, brands benefit more from brand selfies images on social media, which may lead to lower post-engagement but higher brand engagement. Brands should encourage consumers to take more brand selfies and feature such brand selfies on their own social media channels to drive brand engagement.”
Adapted from “The Power of Brand Selfies” by Jochen Hartmann of TUM University, Mark Heitmann of the University of Hamburg, Christina Schamp of the Vienna University of Economics and Business, and Oded Netzer of Columbia Business School.
