Impact of Consumer Engagement on Brand Trust and Brand Loyalty: A Multiple-Perspective Empirical Study

Abstract

Recent years, consumer engagement has become one of the most popular buzzwords in the field of relationship marketing. It is closely related to firms’ performance and consumer relationship management efficiency. The emergence and the development of social media brand community (SMBC) have provided firms with a great impetus to cultivate consumer engagement. However, some of those firms did engage their customers successfully, whereas some of them failed. This is because managers might have no idea about what drives consumers’ engagement and what consumer engagement will bring about. Therefore, it is both necessary and urgent for firms to understand what factors will impact consumer engagement and the outcomes of it in the context of SMBC.

The research on consumer engagement is still underdeveloped. Extant studies have worked on the conceptualization of consumer engagement as well as its antecedents and outcomes but mainly from the perspective of individual benefits. Recent years, researchers (for example, van Doorn et al., 2010; Verhoef et al., 2010) have called for more studies from different perspectives including the hosting firms’ management practice and the characteristics of SMBCs, through which the understanding of consumer engagement will be enhanced and the critical role of consumer engagement in the relationship marketing will be well explained.

To fill the research gaps and to respond to the call of the practice and academia, based on the theory of personal engagement and trust transfer theory, this dissertation investigates the antecedents and outcomes of consumer engagement from three different perspectives: individual psychological conditions, interpersonal relationships, and sponsor firms’ management practice. The main work and the theoretical contributions of this dissertation are as follows:

First, from the perspective of individual psychological conditions of engagement, this dissertation explores the impact of the psychological experience of consumers on consumer engagement and the interplay among these factors in the context of SMBCs. Most of the existing studies have investigated consumer engagement from the perspective of perceived benefits and found that consumers will engage themselves when they perceive potential benefits. These studies had a single perspective and focused on external factors, with the individual internal drivers of consumer engagement ignored. Therefore, from the perspective of psychological conditions, this dissertation established a theoretical model of the factors affecting consumer engagement in the context of SMBC drawing on personal engagement theory and tested the model empirically. The findings showed that perceived recognition, community identification, and self-efficacy significantly impact consumer engagement; self-efficacy strengthens the impacts of the other two factors. Compared with previous studies, this study makes some progress in two ways: (1) It is among the first to extend personal engagement theory to the context of SMBCs and propose three psychological factors that can better explain consumer engagement in this context. (2) This study is an improvement on the previous opinion and suggests that in addition to perceived external benefits, consumers’ psychological experiences are also the keys to consumers’ engagement decision.

Second, this dissertation considers two types of interpersonal trust and examines the mechanisms underlying the impacts of these two types of trust on brand trust. The role of consumer engagement is also examined. Existing research has primarily focused on consumer-consumer trust in the brand community but lack of attention on the trust relationship between consumers and marketers. In addition, in the literature of trust transfer in the online environment, the cognitive-based transfer mechanism has been widely investigated, but the communication-based transfer mechanism has not received enough attention. Based on the theory of trust transfer, this dissertation establishes a theoretical model of trust transfer from consumers and marketers to the focal brand and tested the model empirically. The findings show that trust can transfer from other consumers and marketers to the brand. This process will be mediated by consumer engagement. This dissertation makes two major contributions compared to previous studies. (1) This dissertation emphasizes the importance of consumers’ trust in marketers. Taking both types of trust into consideration can help better understand how to improve consumer engagement by enhancing consumers’ relationships with different elements of SMBCs. (2) This study makes a further understanding of the trust transfer process in the context of SMBCs. It extends the communication-based trust transfer process to the context of SMBCs and found that consumer engagement plays a key role in this process.

Third, this dissertation investigated the impact of sponsor firms’ management practice on consumers’ brand loyalty and revealed the role of consumer engagement and brand trust. Relevant research has mainly studied the development of consumer engagement and consumer-brand relationship from the level of individual consumers but has not paid enough attention to the management behavior of SMBC sponsors. Compared to a traditional online brand community, an SMBC needs the sponsor firm to play a more important role. Building upon the existing literature and the SMBCs practices, this study put forward three factors, namely, interaction encouragement, consumer empowerment, and quality information provision, as three key factors that contribute to consumers’ brand loyalty. The results showed that interaction encouragement and consumer empowerment can improve consumer engagement and brand trust, in turn, lead to brand loyalty. However, high-quality information provision has a significant impact on consumer engagement but not on brand trust. Compared with previous studies, this research contributed to the literature in two ways: (1) This dissertation helps alleviate the bias showed in previous studies that investigated consumers engagement from an individual-level perspective. (2) The findings further clarify the relationship between consumer engagement, brand trust, and brand loyalty. Previous studies have explained their relationships quantitatively or conceptually, while this dissertation provided further empirical evidence.

Fourth, this dissertation discussed the role of a contextual factor in SMBCs, and empirically tested the moderation effect of this contextual factor on the relationship between individual psychological experiences and consumer engagement. Previous research has generally regarded SMBC as a research context but ignored the difference in SMBC type. This article divides SMBC into two types: functional and hedonic SMBC. Results from the comparison analyses showed that for functional SMBCs, the impact of self-efficacy is more significant compared with the other two factors on consumer engagement; for hedonic SMBCs, the impact of community identification is more significant; however, there is no significant difference between the two types of SMBCs for the impact of perceived recognition. Compared with previous studies, this dissertation contributes to the literature in two ways: (1) Previous studies took all the SMBCs as the same. This study distinguished two types of SMBCs and examined their roles during the development of consumer engagement. (2) The findings enhanced the understanding of the contextual conditions of consumer engagement; answering the question of under what conditions will certain psychological experiences have effects on consumer engagement.

Date of Award	17 Sept 2019
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Kwok On Matthew LEE (Supervisor) & Renjing Liu (External Supervisor)