This study examines whether the effectiveness of foreign-brand storytelling on social media depends on the fit between visual concreteness and temporal framing.
The empirical setting involves consumers evaluating stories for foreign brands, many of which market culturally rooted products and rely on cultural cues to communicate meaning. Three online experiments test the joint effects of visual concreteness and temporal framing on brand-related responses, the mediating role of narrative transportation, and the moderating role of perceived cultural congruence.
Concrete visuals are more effective when paired with retrospective narratives, whereas abstract visuals are more effective when paired with prospective narratives. Narrative transportation mediates this effect. In addition, the advantage of visual-temporal fit is strongest at moderate levels of perceived cultural congruence and weaker at low and high levels.
This study is limited by its reliance on data from a single host-market context. Future research should examine whether the proposed temporal-visual congruence mechanism generalizes across different national markets, platform environments, and culturally rooted product categories.
The findings indicate that aligning visual concreteness with temporal framing may offer a useful storytelling strategy for foreign brands on social media. Such alignment may be particularly helpful when culturally rooted stories need to remain interpretable and engaging without being perceived as either too unfamiliar or excessively localized.
The study develops a story-design fit perspective by showing that temporal framing becomes more persuasive when it is supported by a matching level of visual concreteness. The findings further suggest that the benefits of perceived cultural congruence are non-monotonic rather than uniformly increasing. The paper contributes a more focused account of consumer responses to foreign-brand storytelling in a single host-market social-media context.
