Design of Effective Instagram Campaigns:An Empirical Examination of Visual Brand Post Design Stimuli

Masters Thesis from the year 2018 in the subject Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: 1,3, University of Münster (Institute for Value-Based Marketing), language: English, abstract: The following study investigates the influence of traditional design stimuli, applied to a brand post, on the consumers engagement rate on Instagram. Consumer engagement thereby represents the effectiveness of a brand post and is defined by the ratio of the number of likes of a brand post and the number of followers of the brand. Aiming at analyzing the effectiveness of traditional design stimuli on Instagram, the author gathers 450 Instagram brand posts from five different product categories which are subsequently assessed and coded. The researcher then conducts a regression analysis as this allows to evaluate the influence of the traditional visual design stimuli on the consumers engagement rate. Whereas novel & cognitive demanding stimuli are not found to influence the engagement rate for a brand post, certain physically intensive & prominent stimuli as well as some affective & emotional stimuli have a significant influence. The present study further investigates the moderating effect of brand knowledge on the magnitude of the stimulis influence on consumer engagement rate. The results indicate that brand knowledge has a moderating effect on certain stimuli. For all other stimuli, the influence on the engagement rate does not change for different levels of brand knowledge. The results further show that design stimuli applied in brand posts on Instagram differ in their impact on the engagement rate, depending on the product category shown in the brand post. These findings can be used by managers to exploit the benefits of social media marketing on Instagram.