Content is king – But who is the king of kings? The effect of content marketing, sponsored content & user-generated content on brand responses

Highlights

• Different content types lead to differences in brand attitude.

• Conceptual and attitudinal persuasion knowledge act as serial mediators.

• Sponsored and user-generated content differ in their resulting brand attitude.

• Content marketing showed no significant difference to user-generated content.

Abstract

Despite a growing focus on content marketing as a modern marketing tool, research on it is sparse. Missing completely is a comparison of content marketing with other forms of content, namely sponsored and user-generated content, although these content types are of high relevance for the marketing strategy of a company. To fill this research gap, the present study examines how different content types are perceived and how they influence brand responses through persuasion knowledge. A serial mediation model is developed, which posits that different content types lead to a varying conceptual persuasion knowledge, which then influences the activation of attitudinal persuasion knowledge and in turn results in different brand attitudes. The corresponding model is tested in an experimental study, using different content types in the context of the video game industry. The findings indicate that, through the proposed serial mediation, sponsored content leads to a more negative brand attitude than user-generated content and content marketing. These results suggest that, although coming directly from a company, content marketing seemingly is perceived in a similar way as user-generated content. The implications for marketing managers concerning content marketing strategies are discussed.

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.