Consumer engagement (CE) has become one of the marketing problems that many airlines strive to solve. In this sense, emojis implemented to increase CE on social media have gained a stronger popularity as a form of communication among brands. This chapter will provide readers with a deeper understanding of how emoji usage and emoji types affect CE using the highly standardized Unicode classification based on emoji semiotics. Therefore, the author concludes with a case study that investigates the relationship between emoji usage and CE in the official Instagram pages of Turkish airline companies. Also, the author discusses the state of the art in semiotics and concludes by suggesting that the use of emojis by brands may change activism on social media through consumer behavior.
TopIntroduction
Emoji, a different form of communication, has been sent over 2 billion so far as a part of the content created by internet users.1 Therefore, emojis have replaced the natural language in personal and informal computer-mediated communication (Leung et al., 2017). As of September 2020, there are 3,521 different emoji types2 according to Unicode standards. Emojis are classified by Unicode.org in 10 main categories (Smileys&Emotion, People&Body, Component, Animals&Nature, Food&Drink, Travel&Places, Activities, Objects, Symbols, and Flags).3
Emojis are frequently used by businesses as a marketing strategy (Mathews and Lee, 2018). In addition, colourful and highly visual emojis play a universal role in understanding the inner world of the consumer. Emojis also attract the attention of the consumer to products/services and bring brands and them closer (Sümer, 2017). Thus, the primary reason for using emojis by firms is to increase CE (Mathews and Lee, 2018). Additionally, businesses can reach wider audiences and develop better social media strategies through CE (Farook and Abeysekara, 2016). Today, many academic scholars focus on CE to find the motivations that push consumers to online interaction (e.g., de Vries et al., 2012; Cvijikj and Michahelles, 2013; Tsai and Men, 2017; Demmers et al., 2020). CE can be defined as “the intensity of an individual’s participation in and connection with an organization’s offerings and/or organizational activities, which either the consumer or the organization initiate” (Vivek et al., 2012). Therefore, investigating the underlying factors behind consumer brand engagement will shed light on marketing efforts. Previous studies suggest that the post content (i.e., informational, entertaining, or remunerative) characteristics (i.e., vividness, interactivity) or the date (i.e., weekday, workday, or events) shared by companies operating in various sectors are in relationship with engagement (de Vries et al., 2012; Cvijikj and Michahelles, 2013; Schultz, 2017; Devereux et al. 2019; Demmers et al., 2020). However, there are few studies investigating the factors effecting CE in airline industry (Leung et al., 2013; Thao et al., 2017; Öhman, 2017; Menon et al., 2019; Sigurdsson et al., 2020; Sigfúsdóttir, 2019; Koçak, 2021).
As an important part of visual communication on social media (Herring and Dainas, 2017), emojis impact the consumer’s attitudes toward the brands operating in many sectors (Arya et al., 2018; İşler and Demir, 2019) and are among the tools implemented to effect (Pancer et al., 2017; Davis et al., 2019) and to increase CE (Mathews and Lee, 2018).