Calm or Excited? How Marketers Leverage the Emotional Expression of Marketer-Generated Content to Increase Perception of Trustworthiness

Calm or Excited? How Marketers Leverage the Emotional Expression of Marketer-Generated Content to Increase Perception of Trustworthiness

Marketer-generated emotional content on social media is used to communicate with consumers, while the success of social media marketing is built on trust. The present study examined how to leverage the emotional expression of Marketer Generated Content (MGC) to increase consumers' perception of trustworthiness. Building on Affective Valuation Theory, this study investigates how emotional expression of emotional expression of MGC (calm vs. excited) influences consumers' perception of perception of trustworthiness. It introduces individual ideal effects to discuss boundary conditions. Two experiments were designed to test hypotheses. This study found that the consumers' ideal affect status match and mismatch to the emotional expression of MGC results in an increase and decrease of the consumers' perception of trustworthiness, respectively. In addition, this study indicated that perceiving shared emotional values mediated the effect of the match between ideal affect and emotional expression of MGC on the perception of trustworthiness.