THE ROLE OF GENDER BETWEEN THE VISUAL CONTENT AND CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT TOWARDS MOBILE ADVERTISEMENT: A QUALITATIVE APPROACH

Abstract

Mobile phone is a medium of promotion that people carry with them every time. The study aims to use the stimulus organism response mechanism to investigate the concept of customer engagement towards mobile advertising and the effect of visual content, source appearance, and self-influencer congruence in the COVID-19 lockdown context. Four in-depth focus group sessions were conducted, containing respondents from different Pakistan areas and data was analyzed using thematic analysis through NVIVO. The study recommends that visual content positively impacts customer engagement through source appearance and self-influencer congruence in a more robust way, while there is no direct effect of the visual content on customer engagement behavior. The customers have free time and prefer to get information about the product during the pandemic period. However, these customers engage when the source is attractive and has a huge fan following. The lousy source in mobile advertisements intensifies the customers' irritation in the uncertain situation, and they evade it. The findings also illustrate that this study's theoretical model is valid and suggests gender differences play a significant role in engagement strength which is unique and peculiar. This study also minimizes the gaps by conducting qualitative research to explore the impact of COVID-19 lockdown uncertainty on customer engagement behavior.