MODELLING AND MEASURING OF CUSTOMER PARTICIPATION IN SOCIAL MEDIA BRAND COMMUNITIES

Abstract

In the era of social media, a growing number of companies have begun to establish their online brand communities to strengthen their relationships with customers. The emergence of social networking sites (SNSs) on social media platforms have transformed the way individuals communicate with and stay in touch with their social circles. These SNSs have also started to influence the activities of companies including promoting missions, current tasks, achievements of companies, and involving as well as engaging customers. SNSs are not just a platform for connecting with loved ones, but also an online space for brand lovers to interact with each other as well as with the brand. As large number of persons use some form of SNSs, companies are launching their brand pages on these SNSs to get access to their customers in easiest way. These social media brand pages on SNSs attract people who are either devoted to some specific brands or are interested in offerings of that brand in future. Companies have identified the significance of involving customers into their activities and have begun using social media brand communities for connecting with their customers and involving them in their operations. Despite the popularity of social media brand communities, it is still a major challenge for companies to build a successful online brand community due to the nature of customers’ voluntary participation. According to Rapp et al. (2013), around 88 percent of the companies including Media, Travel & Leisure, IT & Telecommunication, FMCG & Retail have already initiated to use various social media platforms and among them approximately 42 percent have fully incorporated different social media sites into their marketing strategies. In addition, approximately 39 percent of customers use social media platforms to obtain information about different offerings of the companies, which makes social media sites to be considered as one of the best prospects by various companies to remain in touch with customers directly. Additionally, Fortune 500 companies are extensively adopting different social media platforms and online communities to make possible direct interactions with their customers. According to some recent findings from ‘Marketing research centre’ about 63 percent of millennials either follow or like different brands on social media platform like Facebook and around 19 percent of the millennials follow them on Twitter also. However, while the importance of customer participation has been acknowledged widely, it has received comparatively less attention from the researchers, specifically in context of social ii media brand communities. Customer participation on social media is known as customer social participation. The online travel communities are one of the important one among all established on social media, where continuous customer participation is of greatest significance. Customer social participation in travel communities plays an important role in building trust and spreading word of mouth towards travel service brand. Despite this, there is a dearth of studies, which have investigated the customer social participation concept in travel communities’ context, which leaves a relevant research gap in the literature. This research attempts to investigate customer participation in social media brand communities, specifically in context of online travel communities. For this purpose, this research capitalizes on literature from various streams such as social media marketing, consumer behaviour, and travel, tourism & hospitality management. Based on the research in these streams, the present research proposes a research model of customer social participation in travel communities and examines it through empirical data. The research model comprises of SNSs participation motivations (building interpersonal relationship, brand likeability, entertainment, information seeking and incentive) as predictor variable which are inevitable for customer participation on social media brand communities and acts as an important antecedents for customer social participation which finally influences brand trust, brand commitment and wordof- mouth in context of travel communities. In addition, brand trust is proposed to act as a mediating variable between customer social participation and its consequences (brand commitment, word of mouth). The study adopts a mixed-method research design that combines both qualitative and quantitative research methods in two phases. The objective of the first qualitative phase is to gain a better understanding of customer social participation in travel communities’ context and propose a research model explaining customer social participation. In the second phase, the proposed research model was empirically tested by developing a measurement instrument for the customer social participation construct. Customer social participation (CSP) is supposed to be a multidimensional construct and a scale was constructed to measure it. For the final validation during the quantitative phase, data were collected from the hotel guests situated in Delhi (India) using survey method. The eligibility of respondents were ensured based on they have either subscribed, liked or joined any e-travel service companies’ community brand page using any social networking site or have ever posted or considered reviews and ratings of any e-travel iii service companies’ via their official site or via mobile app while planning their tour or travels. The survey was conducted through self-administrated questionnaires Exploratory factor analysis (EFA), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modeling (SEM) were used to analyze responses. Findings of the study confirmed a 9-item three-dimensional scale for measuring customer social participation in travel communities. The developed scale revealed sound psychometric properties based on the results from various reliability and validity tests, and from the use of two different samples (student sample for item reduction and initial validation phase and non-student sample i.e. hotel guests for final validation phase). Findings also confirmed that customer social participation in travel communities has a significant and positive influence on brand trust, brand commitment and word-of-mouth behavior of the hotel guests, establishing nomological validity of the developed scale. The key contribution of present research is the formulation of a robust model that explains the customer social participation concept in travel communities’ context and demonstrates that SNSs participation motivations have a significant and positive effect on CSP, which in turn have significant positive influence on brand trust, brand commitment and word-ofmouth behavior of guests. This research proposes an instrument for measuring customer social participation in travel communities’ context; such a scale has not been provided before. In addition, findings of this research also confirmed that brand trust is a key mediating variable in CSP model. It was found that brand trust act as a partial mediator between customer social participation and brand commitment as well as between CSP and word of mouth. Additionally to providing novel perspectives on CSP (particularly in context of online travel communities), the research presents directions for future research. Several managerial implications are also provided.