Image-Related Utility

Image-Related Utility

Reviewed by Faisal Zaidi

The value a person gets from how sharing shapes other people's view of them, as distinct from enjoying the act itself.

What it is

In a field experiment on a microblogging service, Olivier Toubia and Andrew T. Stephen added followers to some accounts, compared their posting with a control group and estimated each user's utility. The results fit both intrinsic and image-related motives, with image-related utility larger for most users.

In effect

In the article on social currency in marketing, it is the research counterpart of Berger's claim that people share what makes them look good.

What it does not say

The estimate comes from one platform and one period. It does not say that image is the only reason people post, since the intrinsic motive also fitted the data.

Sources

  1. Toubia, O., & Stephen, A. T. (2013). Intrinsic vs. image-related utility in social media: Why do people contribute content to Twitter? Marketing Science, 32(3), 368-392.