Current Issue Summary
Dec 2023 (Vol. 64, Issue 4)
How Brand Managers Can Maximize Engagement with ASMR YouTube Content: Influencers Who Give You ‘the Tingles’ via Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response Cues
Research about autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR)—the condition that causes a pleasurable tingling across the head, neck and other areas of the body—has been, until recently, limited to offering insight into the characteristics of ASMR cues and their receivers. That work has “tended to treat said cues as homogeneous and focused on outcomes that are largely outside the digital realm,” Victoria Broadbridge (University of Portsmouth), Federico Mangió (University of Bergamo) and Giandomenico Di Domenico (Cardiff University) observe in their own new study. With this in mind, Broadbridge, Mangió and Di Domenico merged “techniques from digital research and automated text analysis to explore how ASMR sources (i.e., branded, sponsored and nonsponsored) shape users’ digital engagement with content on YouTube.” The upshot: brands that want to market to the ASMR community need to collaborate with ASMR influencers who are highly visible and/or terrific at building emotional connections. What’s more, the authors offer eight ASMR genres that “brand managers can use to determine effective collaborations with influencers and better segment the ASMR community.”
Among the takeaways:
- Compared with content generated by ASMR influencers, branded ASMR content may not be as visible.
- “Prominent ASMR influencers offer greater exposure opportunities because of the higher levels of views and likes.” Brand managers who partner with them stand to elicit higher brand awareness and cursory engagement.
- Forging emotional connections with audiences is what smaller ASMR influencers do best. “Brand managers should partner with them to elicit emotional engagement.”