Holiday marketing of retailers on social media: impact of post appeals and humor on advertising communication effectiveness

Purpose This paper aims to examine how content appeals and humor influence the advertising communication effectiveness of retailers’ holiday posts. Design/methodology/approach Study 1 analyzes secondary data from holiday posts on the Facebook fan pages of seven well-known Taiwanese retailers from 2021 to 2023. Studies 2a, 2b, 3a and 3b further investigate this issue through online experiments. Findings The results indicate that image-building appeals generally yield stronger communication outcomes than product sales appeals. Humor enhances communication effectiveness overall, with its positive impact being more pronounced in product sales appeals. Within this appeal type, cognitive humor outperforms affective humor. For image-building appeals, however, the relative effectiveness of affective versus cognitive humor appears to vary across holiday contexts, receiving marginal support on Valentine’s Day but not during the Ghost Festival. Moderation by humor type should be interpreted as exploratory due to the limited number of affective humor posts in the field data. Research limitations/implications While this study focuses on Facebook, future research could broaden the scope by examining other social media platforms. This research advances appeal and humor theory by showing that the effectiveness of holiday social media posts hinges on the conditional alignment of message appeals, humor strategies and culturally salient contexts. Practical implications This study offers actionable insights for creating more effective social media posts for holiday marketing. It compares the effectiveness of various post appeals and provides guidance for retailers to tailor their content strategies to enhance communication effectiveness. In addition, the research emphasizes the value of incorporating humor into social media posts, offering practical advice on using affective and cognitive humor to boost engagement and improve communication outcomes. Originality/value These findings contribute to the literature on retailers’ social media posting strategies during holidays and provide valuable insights for designing posts during these periods.