INVESTIGATING THE EFFECT OF ONLINE BRAND COMMUNITY CHARACTERISTICS ON CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT

Abstract

In the modern era of digital technology and social media, where business organizations are largely competing for customer attention; online brand communities offer distinctive opportunities to engage customers to deep and meaningful levels. In online brand communities, customers engage in interactive experiences with brands and other members beyond simple purchases (Brodie et al., 2013), thereby creating more stable and long-lasting relationships with brands as well as other members (Islam and Rahman, 2016; Sashi, 2012; Vivek et al., 2014). Given that as many as 2.2 billion people globally used social media in the year 2016 and this population is expected to reach 3 billion by the year 2020 (Statista, 2016); strategic customer insight focusing on social media is indispensible for brands (Dessart, 2017). Since social networking platforms are open and independent (Zhang et al., 2017), customers can easily follow several brand communities and can turn to any brand community for similar content, similar product or service; therefore, it is a crucial task for organization to hold customers with them by engaging them in various brand-related interactions (Hollebeek 2011a; Dwivedi, 2015). Customer engagement in online brand communities has become a strategic tool for marketers to facilitate consumer trust, purchase intention, loyalty, and consequently, organizational profitability (Dessart et al., 2015; Hollebeek, 2011a; Islam and Rahman, 2016a). However, it has also posed a challenge to organization on how to attract customers and engage them in generating content, co-creating brand experience and value, referring brands to others, and assisting in service innovations (Baldus et al., 2015; Brodie et al., 2013; Jaakkola and Alexander, 2014). To overcome such a challenge, academics and organizations have shown an overwhelming interest in exploring online brand communities and the ways in which customers engage in these communities (Islam et al., 2017a; Naidoo and Hollebeek, 2016; Zhou et al., 2014). Despite a huge interest in the organizational as well as scholarly quest for customer engagement, little is known about what motivates customers to continuously interact on these communities (Baldus et al., 2015; Brodie et al., 2013; Islam and Rahman, 2017; MSI, 2016). Gaining a strong knowledge of the motivations that drive customers to engage in online brand communities can help practitioners in achieving excellence by improving the operational standards for this advanced platform of brand communication. However, while the relevance of iii customer engagement has largely been acknowledged, it has received relatively less research attention, especially in context of developing economies. Given that certain key characteristics of online brand communities play an important role in driving customers towards joining the brand communities, the present study seeks to examine, with the help of a proposed conceptual model, the influence of online brand community characteristics (system quality, information quality, reward, and virtual interactivity) on customer engagement and the subsequent effect of customer engagement on brand loyalty, taking into account the moderating role of gender. The Stimulus-Organism-Response theory has been adopted as the theoretical background to justify the proposed conceptual model of this study. After carrying out an extensive literature review on customer engagement and a brief review of customer engagement in online brand communities, this study has undertaken a quantitative cross sectional survey research design for empirically investigating the proposed conceptual model. A self-administered questionnaire survey was conducted among students of four selected universities in Delhi, India. Only those students were taken as the respondents of this study who had an active Facebook account and were members of at least one online brand community. A total of 356 valid responses were taken for the statistical analysis for this study. Testing of various hypotheses pertaining to conceptual model was performed using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) in AMOS 22.0. Findings of this study revealed that at the cumulative level, each of the characteristics of online brand communities positively influences customer engagement, with system quality and information quality bearing the strongest influence. Customer engagement also has a strong positive impact on brand loyalty. Results of the moderation analysis revealed that the impact of all the four characteristics of online brand communities on customer engagement is consistent across male and female members. The key contribution of present research is the formulation of a robust model that explains the customer engagement concept in the context of online brand communities and demonstrates that online brand community characteristics including system quality, information quality, reward, and virtual interactivity drive customer engagement which in turn has a significant positive influence on brand loyalty. Besides, the systematic literature review of customer engagement carried out by the study provides a detailed understanding of the current state of customer engagement research and offers comprehensive information to researchers with iv respect to the avenues for future research. This study also contributes to the engagement literature by offering a preliminary understanding of online brand community-based customer engagement in a non-Western collectivist, emerging economy (Indian) context. Several managerial implications are also provided by the present study.