Prof Kapil Kaushik’s co-authored article titled ‘Riding out the pandemic: The role of brand message appeals on social media in shaping consumer responses’ was published by the Journal of Business Research (JBR). JBR is ranked as A category journal as per the ABDC journal ranking list. Dr. Abhishek Mishra and Dr. Dianne Cyr are his co-authors. Social media is a powerful medium for brands to engage with their consumers, especially during a public health crisis (PHC) when consumers are under duress. This paper examines the brand message appeals that enhance online consumer response during a recent PHC in form of the COVID-19 pandemic. Four message appeals – emotional, rational, moral, and no-crisis – are proposed. The online consumer response to the messages with those appeals is measured by likes and shares. The variation of the effect across brands that sell essential and non-essential products/services is also examined. Following an exploratory study that examines 100 brand tweets to confirm the presence of the proposed message appeals, a total of 26,362 brand tweets on Twitter are collected and empirically analyzed.
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