(SAGE Open, 2020) Abhishek Borah; Sourindra Banerjee; Yu-Ting Lin; Apurv Jain; Andreas B. Eisingerich
Online virality has attracted the attention of academics and marketers who want to identify the characteristics of online content
that promote sharing. This article adds to this body of research by examining the phenomenon of improvised marketing inter ventions (IMIs)—social media actions that are composed and executed in real time proximal to an external event. Using the
concept of quick wit, and theorizing that the effect of IMIs is furthered by humor and timeliness or unanticipation, the authors find
evidence of these effects on both virality and firm value across five multimethod studies, including quasiexperiments, experiments,
and archival data analysis. These findings point to the potential of IMIs in social media and to the features that firms should
proactively focus on managing in order to reap the observed online sharing and firm value benefits.
