The effects of affective and cognitive elaborations from Facebook posts on consumer attitude formation KUAN-JU CHEN*, JOOYOUNG KIM and JHIH-SYUAN LIN Department of Advertising and Public Relations, Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, The University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602-3018, USA ABSTRACT This research investigates the effects of affect and cognition in consumers’ information processing of branded content on Facebook pages. A model was suggested to delve into the elaboration process leading to consumer attitude formation. A 2 (purchase-decision involvement: low versus high) × 2 (product categories: hedonic versus utilitarian) × 2 (sources of Facebook posts: brand posts versus consumer posts) between-subjects experiment was conducted online. The validated model demonstrates the main effects that affective elaboration signifi- cantly supersedes cognitive elaboration in forming attitudes toward the posts and attitudes toward the brand. Post hoc analyses show further evidence of the interaction effects that affective elaboration is the dominant influencer when consumers process brand-related information in Facebook posts across situations. Theoretical implications for future research and managerial suggestions for social media marketing are discussed. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. INTRODUCTION Given the rapidly growing number of social media users, brands of all shapes and sizes have recognized the impor- tance of leveraging brand presence via social media. Mar- keters have embraced branded content in social media to augment their marketing strategies and enhance consumers’ brand experience (eMarketer, 2013). For instance, branded content can be presented in the format of advertising-like text messages (i.e., posts) to promote the brands on social media pages. Of the many social media sites active in the market, Facebook pages serve as the most representative social media platform, because Facebook is “the dominant social network- ing platform” that attracts numerous users (Duggan and Smith, 2013, p. 1). In this light, marketers could utilize brand-related Facebook posts to reach consumers and pros- pects, as well as to stimulate purchasing behaviors and increase both consumer engagement and brand loyalty (Lipsman et al., 2012). Albeit the promising practice of social media in alluring consumers, topics related to consumer mechanisms of pro- cessing brand-related information in social media posts and making attitudinal judgments remain understudied. In con- sumer behavior literature, extant research has illustrated the formation of consumer attitudes after exposing to traditional advertising tactics, such as print advertisements, TV com- mercials, and product trials (e.g., Kempf, 1999; Pham et al., 2001; Kim et al., 2012). Regarding research on social media, empirical work has examined consumers’ motivation to consume and generate brand-related posts via social media (e.g., Chu, 2011; Chu and Kim, 2011; Muntinga et al., 2011; Wien and Olsen, 2012). Considering these research trends, scant research has been conducted to investigate how con- sumer attitudes are constructed in the social media realm, Facebook especially. Because Facebook posts could be gen- erated not only by marketers but also consumers, they are different from advertising messages, which used to be solely created by marketers. Also, unlike passive exposure to ads, consumers voluntarily visit Facebook pages to view brand- related Facebook posts (de Vries et al., 2012). Given the dis- parities between Facebook posts and ads, however, it is not clear whether consumers possess a similar mechanism to pro- cess Facebook posts as they do for processing ads. Research has defined elaboration as the number of infer- ences immediately elicited by given messages in working memory (McQuarrie and Mick, 1999). Specific to con- sumers’ information processing, traditional views specify two major dimensions, namely, affect and cognition, as eval- uative bases for attitude formation (MacKenzie, et al., 1986). Such elicited affect and cognition are thus conceived as af- fective and cognitive elaborations, which serve as the in- process outputs in determining attitudes (Petty et al., 2001; Kim et al., 2012). In line with the multiprocess approach of decision making, still, some scholars (Petty and Cacioppo, 1986; Petty and Wegener, 1999) have claimed that cognitive elaboration plays the primary role in the process of attitude formation, while other scholars (Pham et al., 2001; Kim and Morris, 2007) have suggested that affective elabora- tion primarily influences attitudes. Because social media (e.g., Facebook pages) significantly transform how brand presence is managed online and consumers are in need of shared content (e.g., Facebook posts) to learn about brands (Heinonen, 2011), the psychological states—including affec- tive and cognitive elaborations—through which consumers process brand-related information to form attitudes in social media contexts are a timely topic requiring sustained attention. Taken together, the purposes of this study are three- fold. First, it seeks to identify the roles of affective and cognitive elaborations in consumers’ attitude formation process induced by brand-related information in Facebook posts. Second, drawing on the conceptualization by *Correspondence to: Kuan-Ju Chen, Department of Advertising and Public Relations, Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, The Uni- versity of Georgia, Journalism Building, Room 410, Athens, GA 30602- 3018, USA. E-mail: kuanjuc@uga.edu Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Journal of Consumer Behaviour, J. Consumer Behav. 14: 208–218 (2015) Published online 12 March 2015 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/cb.1515