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

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