Good morning,

It’s vacation season. What better time to engage in self-indulgent behavior? An extra scoop of Ben & Jerry’s after dinner perhaps. Or lazing about in bed until noon. Or maybe, a decadent trip to The Bahamas.

Just don’t post about it on social media—at least not if you’re hoping to get more followers.

According to a study by Kellogg’s Maferima Touré-Tillery, people are unlikely to connect with, or “follow,” someone on social media who posts about being self-indulgent, even if they otherwise like the post. Today, we’ll dig deeper into why that might be the case.

Plus: more on influencer marketing (this time in the gaming world), and the branding mistake that one Kellogg professor thinks too many nonprofits are making.

Critical connections

“You are the company you keep.” It’s an age-old saying, but one that’s no less relevant in today’s digital age.

The people we “follow” online—and whose content we spend hours watching, listening to, or reading—can significantly influence how we behave, what we decide to spend our money on, and even how we view ourselves.

Most of us are well aware of this effect. So we tend to form connections with people who align with our values and interests and, on the flipside, pull away from those who don’t.

In a new study, Touré-Tillery and Kellogg alumna Jessica Gamlin examined this behavior within the context of social media. They conducted a series of experimental tests in which they used a social-media persona on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter to post content that exhibited indulgence or self-control. Then they randomly separated participants into two groups to view either the posts about indulgence or about self-control.

The researchers found that people who saw the posts that seemed self-indulgent were less willing to “follow” or accept a “friend request” from the content creator and less receptive to any recommendations. The effect was especially pronounced among social-media users who believe that spending too much time looking at the indulgent behavior online might prevent them from hitting their own personal goals.

This suggests that, although people may happily “like” an influencer’s self-indulgent posts, they are less interested in forming a long-term connection with that influencer—and are less likely to be persuaded by them.

Read more about the research in Kellogg Insight.

Influencers in action

Of course, these days you’re likely to find influencers peddling influence far beyond social media. Like on the gaming platform Twitch.

A 2019 estimate from The Wall Street Journal suggested that publishers including Electronic Arts and Activision Blizzard have spent as much as $50,000 per hour to get Twitch’s top streamers playing their games; while that eye-popping figure is probably an outlier, it does indicate just how much companies value streaming promotion.

But is that money well spent?

Often not, according to another study, this time by Ilya Morozov, an assistant professor of marketing at Kellogg, and colleague Yufeng Huang. The pair studied how sponsored and organic (that is, non-sponsored) streams translated into video-game usership and purchases. They found that, with a few exceptions, sponsored streams just aren’t worth what companies are paying for them.

“For most of the games in our data, [sponsored streams] are not effective at all—the return on investment is deeply negative,” Morozov says.

You can read more about Morozov’s study in Kellogg Insight.

(Curious about how to name your brand? Calkins weighed in on this very topic in more depth in our first season of Insight Unpacked. Check out that episode here.)

Abraham Kim, senior research editor
Kellogg Insight

Jessica Love, editor in chief
Kellogg Insight