Gen Zs are real: The mediating role of self-brand connection in the relationship between BeReal usage and brand selfies

Abstract

In the last decade, many studies have highlighted the importance of social media (social media; Mayrhofer et al., 2020; Daniel et al., 2018), the power of the consumer-brand relationship (Hayes et al., 2020), influencers (Kim 2022; Lee and Johnson, 2022), and social media influencers (Shan et al., 2020; Zhu et al., 2022) in the field of marketing. According to a recent survey, over 4.7 billion people use social media, of which only 17 have over 300 million active users (Kepios, 2022). A new and particularly popular in young people such application is BeReal. BeReal is a simple photo sharing app where users are invited to upload photos from their daily life once a day and share them on their profile which is visible either only by their "friends" or is public. Every day (at a different time) each user takes a photo within 2 minutes. This app was released in 2020 and is promoted as a "real" app (Shelley, 2022) that prioritizes unedited content (i.e., photos without filters), providing an alternative to highly edited content (e.g., staged and filtered photos). This application is mainly used by young people, and more specifically, Generation Z, which is a very important and dynamic age group, as in America it has a population of about 86 million people, and they have high purchasing power and their lives are identified with the Internet (Fromm and Read, 2018). They are also exposed to a plethora of branded advertising stimuli on a daily basis (e.g., advertisements, banners, suggested posts on the MMS) and their preferences are strongly influenced by the opinion of their peers. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to study (a) which psychographic characteristics the users of the BeReal app have and (b) how advertisers could use the BeReal app to reach Generation Z.