Abstract

Brand owners have increasingly adopted social media for propositioning the values of products and services. This work scrutinizes the nature of ‘values’ embedded in the tweets as propositioned by brand owners. We extract and analyse the tweets (658 of them) posted by the owners of the top-10 coffee chains in a period of three months (August to October of 2015) for their value propositions. This paper identifies 16 different categories of values propositioned by brands. Using consumption value theory as the theoretical basis, the value categories are grouped into four broader category themes (functional, emotional, social and epistemic). The presence of values in a tweet is classified using content analysis undertaken by 4 independent raters. Our analysis of values in tweets reveals that a) different types of values exist in tweets and there are significant differences between values embedded in tweets (independent of brands), b) brands differ in the values they embed within the tweets and c) the presence of certain values stimulates user interests more than others (e.g. through retweeting or liking a tweet). The paper discusses these results in detail along with the implications of the results for marketing practice.

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