The Rise of User-generated Content: How Credible are Brand Selfies?

User-generated content (UGC) is a widely growing and popular form of social media with the development of Web 2.0 technologies (Chia, 2012; Burmann, 2010). Over the last decade, UGC has become a growing research stream (Romaa & Aloini, 2019; Timoshenko & Hauser, 2019). In this context, the construct of credibility has also been largely studied by behavioral and social scientists (Sternthal et al., 1978; Keller & Aaker, 1997; Herbig et al., 1994). Past studies suggest that UGC is more credible than a producer or marketer-generated messages (e.g., advertising). Negative UGC can lead to significant harmful impact for brand (e.g., Cheong & Morrison, 2008). Within UGC, selfies have quickly become a growing phenomenon (Gannon & Prothero, 2016; Fox et al., 2018). More than 300 million selfies have been posted on Instagram in 2018 (Smith, 2019), and many people are posting selfies with brands (Presi et al., 2016; Sing et al., 2018). Increasingly, companies work together with individuals such as micro influencers who promote brand selfies (e.g., Abidin, 2016). However, companies neither know how brand selfies can convey credibility nor how to measure the credibility of brand selfies. In other words, a conceptualisation and reliable and valid scale for measuring brand selfie credibility has not yet been developed. This is the major gap in the literature and this study attempts to fill this gap comprehensively by achieving three aims: (a) to explore the meaning and scope of brand selfie credibility, (b) to construct and validate a scale to empirically measure brand selfie credibility from a viewer’s perspective, and (c) to identify and explore the relationship between antecedents and outcomes of brand selfie credibility.