12 pages., Article 452, Via online journal., Storytelling is a mode of communication in human interaction and is pervasive in everyday life. Storytelling in marketing is also a managerial application as a marketing strategy. Researchers of consumer psychology and marketing have devoted great efforts to developing theories and conducting empirical studies on this approach. However, in addition to narrative theories, many researchers are mainly concerned about the effect of telling a good brand story and its applications, such as advertising design and presentation. However, for those products that usually lacks branding, such as agricultural products, knowledge remains scarce about the relative impact of storytelling in marketing. Few researchers have explicitly developed a valid tool for measuring the effect of storytelling in marketing. To aid storytelling research in consumer psychology, this article conceptualized a construct of the effectiveness of storytelling in agricultural marketing and developed a measure with further validation. This scale consisted of 13 items with four subscales: narrative processing, affect, brand attitude, and purchase intention. The findings of this study supported a structural model with strong order among the four dimensions and good model fit. A discussion of the results and the theoretical and practical implications for consumer psychology and marketing practice are also addressed.
32 pages., via online journal., Following the March 2017 wildfire devastation in Texas, Oklahoma, and
Kansas, local chapters of the National FFA Organization actively engaged
on social media to advocate for public response to the crisis. Twenty-three
public Facebook posts from FFA chapters and affiliates demonstrate members’
engagement with agricultural issues in the United States, disrupting the
generalization that young adults are disconnected from civic affairs.
However, while Facebook served as an important platform for members’
ag-vocacy in the wake of the crisis, FFA chapter posts contain embedded
traditional rural literacies, which are reflected in members’ collective
identification with existing supporters of agricultural communities. While
FFA chapters had the potential to advocate to a broad readership, the
posts reveal the chapters’ way of reading the crisis and writing a response
to it with an insular narrative. As a result, Facebook posts that target
only limited audiences and/or appeal to readers with exclusionary collective
identification result in the failure of entities, such as local FFA chapters,
to capitalize on Facebook’s full potential as an advocacy tool to inform and
engage large public audiences.
23 pages, via online journal., Organizational scholarship has rarely considered various hidden organizations in our society. Thus, little is known about how organizations and their members conceal their identity from others and how outsiders might evaluate the appropriateness of, effectiveness of, and motivations for organizational concealment. Our study reports survey data assessing 14 different hidden organizations and their perceived concealment efforts. Additionally, we examine the appropriateness of three motivations for concealment and three attitudes related to concealment. Results suggest similarities and differences in the effectiveness and appropriateness of concealment efforts by various organizations. Additionally, perceived motivations for concealment explain concealment efforts for some types of organizations, but not others. We draw several conclusions from our findings, discuss scholarly and practical implications of this research, and suggest directions for future scholarship related to organizational concealment.