How to win shares & influence fast-food market: warm & fuzzy can't cut it

• QUT study of 1000s of Facebook posts found cool colours and competence-sounding language promote sharing of fast-food ads, not warm and friendly text

• Content sharing is the most prized type of engagement on social media because it suggests the ad has been evaluated before sharing

• Warm colours and emotional captions have a negative effect on sharing.

Published in the International Journal of Hospitality Management, the study Competence cues drive engagement with food posts on Facebook: Convergent multimodal evidence from the field found that analytical language and blue-green visual cues encouraged significantly more sharing on Facebook than emotionally expressive captions and warm-coloured imagery.

First author, PhD candidate Uchitha Wijesinghe, from QUT's School of Advertising, Marketing and Public Relations, said the study's findings challenged the widely held assumption that warmth is more persuasive in food advertising on social media than other cues.

"In the highly competitive fast-food industry, outlets and delivery services must jostle for consumers' attention and engagement on social media platforms to keep their brand prominent and gain cut-through to potential customers," Mr Wijesinghe said.

"For marketers, the most valued engagement is content sharing which is equivalent to offline word-of-mouth recommendations on social media platforms such as Facebook.

The researchers conducted two studies - the first on Facebook posts from quick service restaurants and the second on Facebook posts from mobile app-based food delivery services.

Each study analysed both text and images separately to test how cues of warmth denoted by warm colours such as yellow and red and competence denoted by blue and green affected social media engagement.

The researchers classified "warmth" as emotionally expressive language and "competence" as language reflecting thinking, reasoning, explanation, causation, and analytical processing.

Food posts containing stronger competence cues were found to be more likely to be shared than posts dominated by emotional language, in fact, warm colours and emotional captions had a negative effect on sharing.

"Our finding that competence-based cues consistently led to stronger engagement through content-sharing indicates people look for evidence of expertise and credibility, even in highly visual and competitive social environments, before they pass a post on to friends."

Mr Wijesinghe said the results suggested to managers that food cues alone might not be sufficient to generate shares.

"The effectiveness of food-related content appears to depend on whether the surrounding message contains visual and text cues that support stronger evaluation of the post," he said.

"When developing text-based content, managers could complement their food-related words with some that reflect thinking, reasoning, or explanation, such as "why choose","because", "true or false", or "this explains".

"Similarly, food imagery may be strengthened when food-related visual content appears alongside a greater presence of blue and green tones."

The research team comprised Mr Wijesinghe, Associate Professor Frank Mathmann, and Associate Professor Di Wang, all from QUT.

The study, Competence cues drive engagement with food posts on Facebook: Convergent multimodal evidence from the field, was published in the International Journal of Hospitality Management.

(Main image, from left: Professor Di Wang, Uchitha Wijesinghe, Associate Professor Frank Mathmann).