Social media allows people to freely interact with others and offers multiple ways for marketers to reach and engage with consumers. Considering the numerous ways social media affects individuals and businesses alike, in this article, the authors focus on where they believe the future of social media lies when considering marketing-related topics and issues. Drawing on academic research, discussions with industry leaders, and popular discourse, the authors identify nine themes, organized by predicted imminence (i.e., the immediate, near, and far futures), that they believe will meaningfully shape the future of social media through three lenses: consumer, industry, and public policy. Within each theme, the authors describe the digital landscape, present and discuss their predictions, and identify relevant future research directions for academics and practitioners.

This research investigates the mechanism by which the aesthetic premium placed on produce contributes to consumers’ rejection of safe, edible, yet aesthetically unattractive, fruits and vegetables, which results in both financial loss to retailers and food waste. Further, the authors identify a novel way in which the devaluation of such produce can be reduced. Five experiments demonstrate that consumers devalue unattractive produce because of altered self-perceptions: merely imagining the consumption of unattractive produce negatively affects how consumers view themselves, lowering their willingness to pay for unattractive produce relative to equivalently safe but more attractive alternatives. This discrepancy in willingness to pay for unattractive versus attractive produce can be reduced by altering the self-diagnostic signal of consumer choices and boosting consumers’ self-esteem. An experiment in the field demonstrates the effectiveness of using easily implementable in-store messaging to boost consumers’ self-esteem in ways that increase consumers’ positive self-perceptions and, subsequently, their willingness to choose unattractive produce. This research, therefore, suggests low-cost yet effective strategies retailers can use to market unattractive produce, potentially raising retailer profits while reducing food waste.

Consumers frequently express themselves by posting about products on social media. Because consumers can use physical products to signal their identities, posting about products on social media may be a way for consumers to virtually signal identity. The authors propose that there are conditions in which this action can paradoxically reduce a consumer’s subsequent purchase intentions. Five experiments demonstrate that posting products on social media that are framed as being identity-relevant can reduce a consumer’s subsequent purchase intentions for the same and similar products, as this action allows consumers to virtually signal their identity, fulfilling identity-signaling needs. Fortunately for retailers, the authors suggest theoretically and managerially relevant moderators that attenuate this negative effect on intent to purchase. These findings have important implications for how firms can conduct social media marketing to minimize negative purchase outcomes.

In the context of user-generated content (UGC), mobile devices have made it easier for consumers to review products and services in a timely manner. In practice, some UGC sites indicate if a review was posted from a mobile device. For example, TripAdvisor uses a “via mobile” label to denote reviews from mobile devices. However, the extent to which such information affects consumers is unknown. To address this gap, the authors use TripAdvisor data and five experiments to examine how mobile devices influence consumers’ perceptions of online reviews and their purchase intentions. They find that knowing a review was posted from a mobile device can lead consumers to have higher purchase intentions. Interestingly, this is due to a process in which consumers assume mobile reviews are more physically effortful to craft and subsequently equate this greater perceived effort with the credibility of the review.

Although engagement of medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) underlies self-referencing of information for younger and older adults, the region has not consistently been implicated across age groups for the encoding of self-referenced information. We sought to determine whether making judgments about others as well as the self influenced findings in the previous study. During an fMRI session, younger and older adults encoded adjectives using only a self-reference task. For items later remembered compared to those later forgotten, both age groups robustly recruited medial prefrontal cortex, indicating common neural regions support encoding across younger and older adults when participants make only self-reference judgments. Focal age differences emerged in regions related to emotional processing and cognitive control, though these differences are more limited than in tasks in which judgments also are made about others. We conclude that making judgments about another person differently affects the ways that younger and older adults make judgments about the self, with results of a follow-up behavioral study supporting this interpretation.