Content is king – But who is the king of kings? The effect of content marketing, sponsored content & user-generated content on brand responses
Introduction
“Content is King” is the title of an essay which Microsoft founder Bill Gates originally presented in 1996. In this essay, Gates talks about the future of the internet, stating in his opening sentence that “Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet (…)” (Gates, 1996, para. 1). By now this essay is more than 20 years old, but it seems that Gates hit the nail right on the head. When doing a quick Google search for “Content is King”, one can see that the phrase is still as popular as ever. While Gates (1996) originally described that the term “content” can mean many things on the internet, the title of his essay is especially popular in two connected fields, namely search engine optimization and content marketing (textbroker, n.d.). Consequently, there are many articles and blog entries discussing why content supposedly is (see for instance Chef n.d.; Jefferson n.d.; West, 2015) or is not king (see for instance Tobak, 2016, White, 2016). Taking a different point of view, the question if content is king might not be the right one to ask. Rather, it should be of interest which underlying mechanisms decide whether content is an effective communication tool or not. In addition it should be determined which type of content is accepted more by recipients because of these mechanisms. Not only does this approach further extend the theoretical understanding of how content is perceived, it also helps marketing professionals to decide which content type best suits their needs. The development of YouTube from a purely user-generated content platform to a platform for professionally produced content shows that for many companies and marketing professionals, content is already an important marketing tool (Kee and Yazdanifard, 2015, Kim, 2012).
This de facto omnipresence of content makes the question whether content is king obsolete and instead lays the focus on the question of what content is the best content, or in other words, who is the king of kings? Looking at this question, three types of content that are prominent in the marketing literature are compared in an experimental design: content marketing, sponsored content and user-generated content. A serial mediation model is developed and tested to examine whether these content types lead to differentiating brand responses and whether such differences can be explained through persuasion knowledge. We hypothesized that these three content types are perceived differently by consumers because they activate the conceptual and attitudinal persuasion knowledge of consumers to a different extent. By showing that this is the case, our research goes beyond previous evidence by comparing three types of content that so far have only been investigated on their own. This provides an interesting contribution to the literature on content marketing and leads to explicit managerial implications for marketing professionals. By investigating how different content types possibly influence peoples' perception through conceptual and attitudinal persuasion knowledge in serial mediation, this study furthermore contributes to the understanding of how people process information of persuasive nature, therefore bearing importance for the literature on persuasion and consumer behavior.
Section snippets
Previous work on different content types
The term user-generated content is used broadly and can be applied to very different media types, which can be a problem when trying to compare different user-generated content studies with each other. One form of user-generated content that has been researched are reviews, with studies showing that positive reviews influence the number of bookings on a travel website (Ye, Law, Gu, & Chen, 2011) and that people are more likely to use reviews if they perceive the credibility of the source to be
Hypotheses
Following the literature on user-generated content, sponsored content and content marketing, a difference regarding brand responses is to be expected. If different content types lead to a different level of persuasion knowledge, this should in turn influence participants brand attitude as a reaction to the persuasion attempt. As described in the chapter on persuasion knowledge, the first step in its activation is to recognize a message as persuasive in nature. For many content forms on the web,
Participants
As the study dealt with video games, people with an interest in video games were recruited as participants for this study. Recruitment platforms were popular online gaming communities as well as gaming related social media channels. All of these platforms were exclusively English speaking, so that it was ensured that participants were able to understand English. Participants were told beforehand that the study was about gaming videos on YouTube and was specifically searching for gamers as
Results
The descriptive statistics and correlations are summarized in Table 1. It is important to note, that a high level of attitudinal persuasion knowledge is indicated by a low trustworthiness. As conceptually assumed, the results show significant correlations between conceptual persuasion knowledge and attitudinal persuasion knowledge as well as attitudinal persuasion knowledge and brand attitude.
While no hypothesis concerning content marketing was formulated, the content marketing condition will
Discussion
Overall, the pattern of results supported hypotheses 1 to 3. People in the sponsored content condition, compared to the user-generated content condition, had a higher level of conceptual persuasion knowledge, leading to a stronger activation of attitudinal persuasion knowledge and finally resulting in a more negative brand attitude. Additionally, no difference between the content marketing condition and the user-generated content condition was found, whereas content marketing lead to a more
Conclusion
The research on different content types is still in its early stages. While there is a good foundation concerning sponsored content and user-generated content, the research on content marketing is still lacking and comparisons between content types are virtually non-existent. This study provides some insights on the differences between content types and how they affect brand responses. Compared to user-generated content, sponsored content leads to a higher conceptual persuasion knowledge,
Financial disclosure
There are no financial conflicts of interest to disclose.
Acknowledgements
We thank the YouTuber Aavak for the permission to use his video as a part of this study. We also thank the developer Lion Shield for the permission to use their game as a part of this study.
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