Regulatory-focused social media engagement for health messages

Organisations working in health promotion and behaviour change marketing are increasingly taking advantage of social media platforms as communication channels to reach out to their target audience and disseminate messages. The present research investigates the impact of incentives, ad appeal, and gender identification, on consumers’ social media engagement in health-related ads. This research uses the regulatory focus theory to discover the effectiveness of anti-smoking ad framing in antismoking advertisements. The aim is to determine how males/ females react and engage with health-related social media ads, framed with promotion vs. prevention-focused appeals. A series of experimental studies examine the level of social media consumer engagement under three different incentive conditions (monetary, social good, no incentive), for two types of ad appeals (promotion vs. prevention-focused), each ad appeal has two versions (A female vs a male version). This research also examines the moderating role of incentives, and gender identification on social media engagement.