دانلود رایگان مقاله تعامل نام تجاری مصرف کننده در رسانه های اجتماعی

Abstract

In the last three decades, an influential research stream has emerged which highlights the dynamics of focal consumer/brand relationships. Specifically, more recently the ‘consumer brand engagement’ (CBE) concept has been postulated to more comprehensively reflect the nature of consumers' particular interactive brand relationships, relative to traditional concepts, including ‘involvement.’ However, despite the growing scholarly interest regarding the undertaking of marketing research addressing ‘engagement,’ studies have been predominantly exploratory in nature, thus generating a lack of empirical research in this area to date. By developing and validating a CBE scale in specific social media settings, we address this identified literature gap. Specifically, we conceptualize CBE as a consumer's positively valenced brand-related cognitive, emotional and behavioral activity during or related to focal consumer/ brand interactions. We derive three CBE dimensions, including cognitive processing, affection, and activation. Within three different social media contexts, we employ exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses to develop a reliable, 10-item CBE scale, which we proceed to validate within a nomological net of conceptual relationships and a rival model. The findings suggest that while consumer brand ‘involvement’ acts as a CBE antecedent, consumer ‘self-brand connection’ and ‘brand usage intent’ represent key CBE consequences, thus providing a platform for further research in this emerging area. We conclude with an overview of key managerial and scholarly implications arising from this research.

Managerial Implications

In addition to scholarly contributions, this research also generates a number of managerial implications. First, by providing a CBE conceptualization, this work provides managers with an enhanced understanding of the emerging ‘engagement’ concept (Fournier and Avery 2011), which may be adopted in the design of specific CBE- or broader relationship marketing (e.g. loyalty)- focused strategies and tactics. This research suggests a potential contributing role of CBE to specific consumer ‘self-brand connection,’ and ‘brand usage intent’ outcomes, which may represent useful information for managers. Further managerial benefits may accrue from the adoption of the proposed CBE scale in specific organizational or brand-related settings. To illustrate, this research indicated that CBE may contribute to the development of consumer-perceived ‘brand usage intent,’ which is based, conceptually, on brand equity. Specifically, in today's highly competitive environment managers are challenged regarding how to best retain their profitable customers, who may exhibit specific switching behaviors. Hence practitioners' capability to measure and quantify consumer CBE levels, and assess these relative to specific key performance indicators, is expected to generate enhanced understanding of CBE and its outcomes, including consumer-perceived ‘brand usage intent’ and ‘loyalty.