Evaluating the impact of advertising strategies on rural brand building: Insights from the personal care FMCG sector

This paper analyzes an emerging form of social media marketing, meme marketing, which has gained attention for its ability to entertain and engage users. Marketers and companies are recognizing the value of using memes as a tool to connect with consumers. To understand the effects of meme marketing activities, this paper aims to examine the impact of meme marketing activities on consumer purchase intentions and concurrently assess the mediating role of consumer engagement. The study encompassed 452 Indian social media users with active social media accounts and familiarity with memes and meme marketing concepts. It employed a quantitative methodology backed by robust statistical techniques. The method used for analysis was Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) through Analysis of Moment Structures (AMOS) software. The results found that meme marketing activities have a direct and significant positive impact (β = 0.257, p < 0.05) on consumer purchase intentions. It further shows that meme marketing has a direct and significant positive impact (β = 0.745, p < 0.05) on consumer engagement. It shows that consumer engagement has a direct and significant positive effect (β = 0.651, p < 0.05) on consumer purchase intention. However, the indirect impact of meme marketing activities on consumer purchase intentions is also significant, resulting in partial mediation. The study findings hold value for marketing managers, agencies, and companies that interact and engage consumers with memes and undertake meme marketing activities.

Competition in the hotel industry makes it necessary to study innovative ways to preserve and increase customer base. Effective interaction with customers is evidence of hotels’ innovative activity determined by the active implementation of marketing concepts and the development of information technologies. Therefore, customer engagement involves digitalizing the “hotel-consumer” interaction process. This study aims to determine the components of digital customer engagement in the hotel industry using systematization, generalization, survey, and econometric models. The components of digital customer engagement include recognition, interest, communications, consumer experience, loyalty, and intentions of repatronage. Econometric models used the data of hotels in Kyiv (Ukraine) to prove the dependence of their income on the costs of digital consumer engagement. For financial indicators, the study surveyed hotel managers and stakeholders. The selected indicators have a significant influence on hotel income. In the case of a linear model (“Khreshchatyk” hotel), the parameters show how many units the effective feature will change when one-factor characteristic changes by one unit (assuming other factors are constant). In the case of power-law models (“Bratislava” and “Ukraine” hotels), the parameters are essentially elasticity coefficients that demonstrate the sensitivity of income changes to changes in factor characteristics. Accordingly, the coherence of implementation of all components in the digital engagement of hotel services’ consumers ensures an increase in service provision volume and hotel operations’ efficiency.

Acknowledgment
The paper shows the author’s results within the frameworks of the study, performed in 2021−2023 at Kyiv National University of Trade and Economics at the request of the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, “Digital transformation of trade, economic and tourist systems in Ukraine” (state registration number 0121U112231) and “Forecasting the impact of the tourism system on the country’s economy” (state registration number 0122U001559).

The primary aim of this research is to investigate the effects of Advertisement Presentation of Contents (APC) and Advertisement Visual Types (AVT) on the eWOM of Sharia hotels. A quantitative approach was utilized, analyzing 202 Instagram posts from five Indonesian Sharia hotels between June and November 2023. The methodology involved the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) with Partial Least Squares (PLS) analysis using Smart PLS software. The results revealed that visual content types, such as photos, videos, and reels, significantly enhance consumer attraction, with a path coefficient of 0.372 and a p-value of 0.000, indicating a strong positive influence. In contrast, hashtags and links showed no significant effect, with a path coefficient of -0.838 and a p-value of 0.000. The R-squared adjusted value of 0.208 indicates that the independent variables explain 20% of the variance in the dependent variable. The AVT’s influence on eWOM is at a high level (f-squared = 0.042). These findings suggest that Sharia hotels should prioritize creating high-quality visual content to enhance their social media marketing strategies. The study concludes that effective visual content on Instagram can enhance eWOM and improve consumer perceptions of Sharia hotels, enabling them to compete with conventional hotels. These findings provide valuable insights for Sharia hotel marketers to optimize their social media strategies, emphasizing the importance of visual content over textual elements like hashtags and links.