FOMO, Brands and Consumers – about the Reactions of Polish Internet Users to the Activities of Brands in Social Media (Based on CAWI Representative Research)

Abstract

Fear of Missing Out is mainly a subject of psychological research; however, due to its specificnature, it gains an interdisciplinary character. Thanks to this, it can also be analysed from the per-spective of media or business. This paper focuses on the threads of the relationship between FOMOand marketing communication online. It realizes the following objectives: it presents the scale ofFOMO in Poland; it analyses the phenomenon in the context of consumers’ reactions to basic brandactivity on social and it shows differences between the answers given by all the respondents andthose with high FOMO. In order to clarify the scope of the research work, four research questions areanswered: how do social media users react to the use of particular features of social platforms bybrands? What form of posts coming from brands are preferred by Polish Internet users? What is theattitude of the respondents towards advertisements posted on social media portals? Does FOMOinfluence the answers in any way? The research was based on the nationwide, representative sampleof Internet users aged 15+ (N=1060). The tool was the CAWI questionnaire.