Antecedents of Brand Relationship Quality: The Role of Customer Brand Engagement in Facebook brand communities

Abstract

The study of Customer-Brand Relationships and its components has picked up the enthusiasm of both researchers as well as advertisers over the most recent three decades. Especially, recognizing the methods for building suffering associations with clients has been a well-known research stream. As of late, where the technology advances rapidly, social media is considered as best tool of interaction in which customers have strong position than brands as ever before. Online brand communities are developed on social media specifically on Facebook, play an important role to interact and build relationship with customers. With the advent of Facebook, the idea of brand customers’ engagement has been emerged to exhaustively mirror the idea of the client brand relationship and broadened area of relationship showcasing. Client commitment has been seen as an important factor for measuring brand execution just as a key basic for building up upper hand. Since 2010, an exploratory work has been done that deals with the idea of commitment. In any case, notwithstanding the developing academic intrigue, the absence of experimental research with respect to client brand commitment has brought about a constrained comprehension of the idea and its estimation. Following an efficient audit of client brand commitment examines, one constraint was: absence of conceptualization of the develop and other restriction was: the absence of a solid and legitimate client brand commitment scale. In that capacity, the momentum explore reacts to the call made in Marketing science Institute (2014) to build up a client brand commitment conceptualization from Service Dominant (S-D) rationale point of view and develop its scale. Specifically, for scale development a two-stage research design was adopted to develop a reliable and valid construct scale and test the hypothetical model to enhance BRQ. Two studies were conducted with two independent samples, named as study1 and study2. In study 1, data was collected from active Facebook users in Pakistan. Clothing industry has been chosen as population and sample was comprised of students. The useable 253 questionnaires were received from respondents and researcher employed Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and to purify the generated items obtained from literature review. We focus on the analysis of internal consistency, discriminant, and convergent validity of the scale. Our results provide evidence for a second-order customer engagement ix construct that consists of seven first-order constructs named as: attention, absorption, enjoyment, enthusiasm, sharing, learning, and endorsing. In study 2, we develop a model of customer brand engagement based on online brand community using Facebook. The purpose of the model is to test the nomological validity of the newly developed scale. Based on the social media engagement theory, the proposed model includes brand identification, brand community identification, brand community engagement, customer brand engagement and brand relationship quality. Data was generated from useable questionnaire of 501 members from different clothing brand communities based on Facebook. SEM was used to test the seven hypothesized relationship among brand identification, brand community identification, brand community engagement, customer brand engagement and brand relationship quality. The results derived from the data analysis suggest that brand related factors as well as community related factors influence customer brand engagement and enhance customer brand relationship quality and strength. The ongoing research contributes further bits of knowledge into the idea of the commitment idea in four different ways: first, it builds up a conceptualization from Service Dominant (S-D) rationale point of view. Second, it creates substantial and dependable scale that shows the multi-dimensional nature of the build. Third, chiefs can utilize the recently created scale to gauge the client brand commitment level to have a superior comprehension of brand relationship quality through client commitment conduct in the Facebook based brand network. At long last, the created model of relationship quality can assist with understanding the variables that impact customer relationship in the online brand network. Thus, it delineates the significance of customer engagement to create relationship that will upgrade brand notoriety.