Fostering Consumer–Brand Relationships in Social Media Environments: The Role of Parasocial Interaction

The proliferation of social media platforms and corresponding consumer adoption in recent years has precipitated a paradigm shift, significantly altering the ways customers engage with brands. Organisations recognise the social and network value of engagement within social media, and practitioners are endeavouring to build engagement through their social media content. However, theoretically based academic guidance concerning marketing practice and engagement in new media social networks is limited. This article provides a theoretical model to explicate the role of social media content in facilitating engagement behaviour within a social media context. Based on uses and gratifications theory, it provides a model for how an organisation can stimulate positively valenced engagement behaviour through social media and dissuade negatively valenced engagement behaviour in this forum. A typology of social media engagement behaviour is proposed and a series of hypotheses exploring the relationships between social...

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Social media engagement behaviour: a uses and gratifications perspective

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How do brand communities generate brand relationships? Intermediate mechanisms

Gratifications of using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat to follow brands

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to examine how the nature of consumers' relationship with a brand influences brand evangelism, which represents an intense form of brand support behavior. Specifically, the study investigates the influence of two consumer-brand relational constructs, brand trust and brand identification, on brand evangelism. Brand evangelism, conceptualized as an amalgam of adoption and advocacy behaviors, is operationalized in terms of three supportive behaviors: purchase intentions, positive referrals, and oppositional brand referrals. Design/methodology/approach – Drawing from prior research on consumer-brand relationships, a framework of brand relationships and brand evangelism is developed. To provide a more robust test of theory, consumers' extraversion, gender, and brand experience are included as control variables. Structural equation modeling is used to test the proposed hypotheses. Findings – The findings reveal that consumer-brand relationships influence brand evangelism, ...

The influence of brand trust and brand identification on brand evangelism

We investigate the causal relationship between brand community identification, brand affect, community loyalty, brand loyalty, brand evangelism, and community evangelism, developing a structural equation model set within the context of online brand communities for newly hybridized roses. The analysis considers size as a moderator for the relationships between constructs, comparing small and large web-based brand communities. Findings highlight that small communities operate differently from larger ones with regard to numerous aspects, and possess specific strengths and weaknesses. Members of small communities develop higher community loyalty; brand loyalty in small community stems more from community loyalty than from brand affect; small communities engage in word of mouth for the community more than in word of mouth for the brand. Managerial implications are addressed.

Giuseppe Cappiello

Papers

Does size matter? an examination of small and large web based brand communities