It’s Fun to Play: Emoji Usage in Interactive Marketing Communication

Editorial – What is an interactive marketing perspective and what are emerging research areas?

“…Fan culture and fandom behavior, in particular, have changed the consumer-brand relationship as such consumers are also playing the roles as enthusiasts, hobbyists, reviewers, bloggers, live-streamers and influencers in various digital platforms and virtual brand community (Liao et al , 2023; Wang, 2020). The fast development of social media are essentially interactive platforms with built-in interactive tools including hashtag (Kwon and Ha, 2023), emoji (Huang et al , 2022; Wu, 2023; Valenzuela-Gálvez et al , 2023) and video barrage (Wei, 2023), etc., allows consumers interact with live-streamers, influences and other consumers through direct and instant feedback. Moreover, the contemporary interactive marketing also transformed from mass-media digital marketing into the connected world, taking an “organic” or natural form that integrates shopping with daily live events through generating, disseminating and sharing news, new personal stories, creative works, photos and ideas (Güngör and Çadırcı, 2023; Rashidirad and Shahbaznezhad, 2023).…”