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The Role of Humour in Driving Customer Engagement

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Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2017

Abstract

Customer engagement is seen as a central measure of marketing effectiveness on social media; yet, very little is known about the factors that drive it. This research focuses on message characteristics and more specifically the role of humour in encouraging likes, comments and reposts. Based on a sample of firm-initiated Weibo posts by a Chinese provincial destination marketing organization, it investigates whether humorous messages are more effective. In addition, it also considers whether a message contains a product focus and is complex in terms of its length, lexical density and inclusion of multimodal elements. The findings confirm the proposed influence of humour but suggest an even stronger impact of non-product related contents and also indicate that the message factors modelled only account for about 25% of the variance of customer engagement.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory for Intelligent Systems in Tourism, Saint Lucia, Queensland, Australia

    Jing Ge

  2. Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA

    Ulrike Gretzel

Authors
  1. Jing Ge
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  2. Ulrike Gretzel
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Correspondence to Jing Ge .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Tourism, HES-SO Valais-Wallis, Sierre, Valais, Switzerland

    Roland Schegg

  2. School of Hospitality and Tourism Management, University of Surrey, Guildford, United Kingdom

    Brigitte Stangl

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Ge, J., Gretzel, U. (2017). The Role of Humour in Driving Customer Engagement. In: Schegg, R., Stangl, B. (eds) Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2017. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51168-9_33

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