Consumers Engagement Behaviour in Social Media: Do Different Brand Categories Matter? Ligita Zailskaite-Jakštė, Robertas Damaševičius, Armantas Ostreika and Kumar Anubhav Tiwari Faculty of Informatics, Kaunas University of Technology, Kaunas, Lithuania
[email protected] Abstract: Consumer engagement behaviour can differ with respect to brand-related content in social media and it can be evaluated as the result of successful brand communication. The positive and negative content created by consumers about brands in social media platforms is can be evaluated as part of company marketing communication. Our research aims to identify the differences between consumer engagement behaviour into different brand-related content in social media seeking positive impact on brand equity in different brand categories. We group consumer behaviour actions into three engagement levels (consuming, participating, and producing). The brand equity is defined by three dimensions such as awareness, associations and loyalty. We have applied moderation analysis seeking to identify the engaged consumer behaviour impact on brand equity in different brand categories. We explored the relationship between the hedonic and utilitarian style of brand posts and consumer sociability behaviour on Facebook brand pages grouped into eight brand categories such as clothing/footwear industry, supermarkets, information technology products, hospitality, architecture and engineering, personalities, places, institutions and organisations. Moderation analysis has confirmed (p < 0.001) positive interaction between consuming and loyalty variables when moderators are brand supermarket domains. In other cases, the interactions between brand engagement levels and brand equity dimensions were negative. Keywords: consumer engagement behaviour, social media, brand equity, impact
1. Introduction In recent years, a large number of practical and scientific studies seeks to analyze the phenomena of consumers engagement in social media (Barger, Peltier and Shultz, 2016). According to Oh, Roumani, Nwankpa & Hu (2017) there is a lack of studies that analyse the impact of consumer engagement behaviour on business. According Chevalier and Mayzlin (2006), negative ratings and reviews have a greater impact on sales than positive reviews. Phang, Zhang, Sutanto (2013) identified that increased consumers engagement in social media led to a favourable attitude toward consumption. Based on eMarketer (2015) statistics, in the United States, 9 companies of 10 with around 100 employees used social media for marketing purposes. But it still remains the question, what impact makes the consumers communication in the social media on brands. The term engagement was at first analyzed in psychological sciences. Kahn (1990) was the first to use this term in the work environment to describe different employee roles and argued that consumers who receive support for their personal self-awareness tend to be more involved. However, Maslach, Schaufel and Leiter (2001) defined the engagement as a constant, positive, motivational state in the work environment. Recent studies define the phenomenon of engagement as a process (Bowden, 2009), behaviour (van Doorn et al., 2010) or status (Brodie ir kt., 2011). Javornik and Mirelli (2013) define four trends of consumers engagement analysis: behavioural, multidimensional, psychological and social. It has been identified that behaviour consumer engagement perspective is used mostly in the social media context. Seeking to disclose the consumers engagement impact on brand equity, it was applied the behavioural perspective in this work as well.
2. The perspective of consumer engagement behaviour The Van Doorn et al. (2010) offered consumer engagement behaviour perspective was used by Dolan, Conduit, Fahy, Goodman (2015), and Barger, Peltier, Schultz (2016). This perspective is closely related to the active role of consumers in social media (Kumar et al., 2010; Sashi, 2012). Javornik and Mirelli (2013) state that the consumer engagement perspective includes a repurchase. Van Doorn et al. (2010) emphasize, that consumers engagement in social media goes beyond the transaction. According Kumar et al. (2010), consumer interaction with the company, regardless of whether it is moving towards a transaction or not, can be called consumer engagement.
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Ligita Zailskaite-Jakštė et al. The consumers engagement behavioural perspective include antecedents of engagement, consumers behaviour and consequences for companies, consumers (and companies). The types of engagement behaviours differ in the valence (van Doorn et al., 2010, Hollebeek & Chen, 2014).) activity of contribution, engagement level (Malthouse et al., 2013; Muntinga et al., 2011; Dolan, Conduit, Fahy and Goodman, 2016). According to Dolan et al. (2016) the concept “social media engagement behaviour“ (SMEB) disclose consumers’ behaviour when the consumers are engaged in social media. Three types of the engagement are positive valence (van Doorn et al., 2010) and three of negative valence (Hollebeek & Chen, 2014). Positively valence engagement could be named as consuming, positive contribution and co-creation. Negatively valence engagement levels are detaching, negative contribution and co-destruction and disclose unfavourable brand-related behaviours during interactions (Hollebeek and Chen, 2014). Barger, Peltier and Schultz (2016) also state that consumers behaviour in social media can be measured by their actions that consumers take on social media in response to brand-related content: commenting content, sharing content with others consumers and posting user-generated content. Schivinski, Christodoulides and Dabrowski (2016) proposed consumers’ engagement levels such as consuming, contribution and creation. Consuming is the type of activities represents related to consumers who passively company and consumers related content. The contribution is the medium level of consumer activity, which reflects consumers' contribution to companies’ content through participation. Especially researchers pay a lot of attention to consumers such actions as "Like", share and comments. The creating dimension includes consumer creation of different types of content. In social media consumers engagement behavioural perspective is disclosed trough active consumers role; it involves different consumer actions; it includes a permanent interaction between the consumers and the brand. In this paper, we analyze positive valence consumer engagement behaviour seeking to identify the positive impact on brand equity.
3. Consumers engagement behaviour impact on brand equity According to Rios and Riquelme (2008), the brand equity dimensions used offline can be used in virtual space as well. Aaker (1991) suggests measuring the brand equity using such dimensions as awareness, association, perceived value, loyalty and other brand assets. The analysis of 33 studies related to brand equity dimensions showed that the commonly used dimensions are awareness, associations and loyalty. Awareness is characterized by the depth and the breadth of awareness (Keller, 2003). Brand associations defined as thoughts of the consumer, that are directly and / or indirectly related to brand names: colours, sounds, feelings, smells, flavours, consumer situations, and etc. (Keller, 2003), while the loyalty of brand equity is the result of the brand knowledge, which is defined by awareness and image. In social media, the brand equity is measured through consumer perceptions of the brand and a positive response to brand communication (Rios and Riquelme, 2008). Brand equity cannot be formed if consumers do not recognize and do not remember the particular brand and their associations (Rios and Riquelme, 2008).
4. Theoretical framework There is a lack of studies seeking to identify the differences in consumer engagement behaviour on brand equity in different brand categories. Previous studies disclosed that there is the difference in consumer choice between two products by measuring the intention to buy or a preference for the focal brand in comparison with the noname counterpart (Yoo, Donthu, Lee, 2000). Consumers communication in social media makes an impact on brand equity dimension as brand loyalty (Schivinski and Dąbrowski, 2013). Schivinski et al. (2016) proposed consumers engagement behaviour into brand-related content scale but didn’t provide any insights related with statistical significant differences between different brand categories. De Vries et al. (2012) used brand categories as controlled variables, seeking to identify the significant difference between such consumers’ behaviour as press of icon “Like” and comments. It was disclosed that there is no statistically significant difference between product categories, but the consumers’ engagement behaviour differ
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Ligita Zailskaite-Jakštė et al. in different brand categories. Consumers are susceptible to engage less in accessories brands compare to brands in other categories. According to the mentioned factors, we make the assumption, that consumer engagement behaviour in social media can make an impact on brand equity dimensions and propose the following conceptual research model (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Conceptual research model
5. Methodology In further analysis, we follow the general model for testing mediation and moderation effects, proposed by Fairchild and MacKinnon (2009). The moderation model tests whether the prediction of a dependent variable, Y , from an independent variable, X , differs across levels of a third variable, M . Moderation effects are tested with multiple regression analysis. A single multilinear regression equation forms the basic moderation model:
Y
i0 E1 X E 2 M E3 XM H
(1)
E1 is the coefficient relating the independent variable, X , to the outcome, Y , E 2 is the coefficient relating the moderator variable, M , to the outcome Y , i0 the intercept in the equation, and H is the residual. here
The regression coefficient for the interaction term,
E 3 , provides an estimate of the moderation effect. If E 3
is
statistically different from zero, there is significant moderation of the X - Y relation in the data.
6. Data collection and measurement The study used a quantitative method to explore the relationship between the consumes engagement levels and brand equity dimensions. The questionnaire link was available for eleven weeks from the 17 of July to the 30 of October of 2017 in different social media channels (i.e., Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Lithuanian forum Supermama.lt). The survey used a seven-item Likert scale ranging from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree". All brands provided by the respondents were grouped into eight brand categories such as clothing/ footwear, supermarkets, information technologies, hospitality, architecture and engineering, personalities, places/organisations, online brands. It is worth’s to mention, that according to the classification of economic activities of the Department of Statistics in Lithuania, the clothing/ footwear and supermarkets belongs to the same retail category. A total of 325 questionnaires were completed. The sample consisted of 52,5 % males and 47,2 % females. The biggest group of the respondents were young people, 67.4% were 18 to 24 years old. The other groups by the age were 16.5% were 25 to 35 years old, 7,5 % were 36-45 years old, 3.4 % were 46-55 years old, 3,7 % were younger than 18 years old and 1.6 % older than 55 years.
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7. Results In our analysis, we test the statistical significance of the following moderators and related variables (Table 1). The moderators are brand categories classified according to type of economic activity. Table 1: Moderators and related variables Hypothesis H1
H2
H3
H4
H5
H6
H7
H8
Independent variable Consuming I read posts related to Brand X on social media sites Consuming I read fan pages related to Brand X on social media sites Contribution I initiate posts related to Brand X on social media sites Creation I write posts related to Brand X on blogs Contribution I initiate posts related to Brand X on social media sites Consuming I “Like” posts related to Brand X Consuming I „Like“ pictures / graphics related to Brand X Contribution I post pictures / graphics related to Brand X
Dependent variable Awareness I easily recognize Brand X
Moderator Clothing and footwear industry
Awareness I easily recognize Brand X
Clothing and footwear industry
Awareness I can quickly recall the name of Brand X Association X is an attractive Brand
Architecture and engineering industry
Association X is an interesting Brand Loyalty I like to visit Brand X account in social media Loyalty I like to visit Brand account in social media Loyalty I like to visit Brand X account in social media
Brands of education institutions, municipal authorities, places, NGO Brands of education institutions, municipal authorities, places, NGO Supermarkets
Supermarkets
IT products
We assume the statistical significance D 0.001 and perform multilinear regression of responses Y on predictors X , M and XM (see Eq. 1). The results are presented in Figure 2. Note that the confidence limits of all interaction terms do not contain zero value. The interaction for hypothesis H6 and H7 is positive, while for other hypotheses it is negative. That means that, e.g., the followers of the Supermarket brands are more likely to visit the social account of the brand, if they pressed “Like” near the posts.
Figure 2: Interaction coefficient values (with p=0.001 confidence limits) of hypotheses H1-H8
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Ligita Zailskaite-Jakštė et al. Finally, we have evaluated the R2 value (coefficient of determination) of linear regression without moderation factor and with moderation factor. Moderation factor significantly increases the R2 value (see Figure 3)
Figure 3: R2 values of regression without and with moderation factors
8. Discussion Our results are consistent with findings of other authors, who have noted strong feelings of consumers about the supermarkets they patronize, and how it drives their loyalty beyond product purchase (Allaway et al., 2011). The phenomenon is known as ‘brand love’ and has a strong social role as one of its dimensions (Kang, 2015), while the use of social cues by retailers provides consumers with enhanced perceptions of human connection and the formation of emotional bonds (Wang, 2007). On the other hand, as it was already noted by Chaudhary (2018), the satisfied consumers are more affection towards hedonistic brands and symbolic utility brands rather than to the utilitarian ones, which also agrees well with our findings that show no positive interaction with the utilitarian-type of brands, such as clothing and footwear industry, or architecture and engineering industry.
9. Conclusion In the context of social media, it is mostly used behaviour consumer engagement perspective, because this perspective discloses the active role of consumers; involve different consumer actions; includes a permanent interaction between the consumers and the brand. In this paper, we have analyzed the differences between consumer engagement behaviour into different brand-related content in social media. We grouped consumer behaviour actions into three engagement levels (consuming, participating, and producing), and defined three dimensions of brand equity as awareness, associations and loyalty. We have applied moderation analysis seeking to identify the engaged consumer behaviour impact on brand equity in different brand categories. The results of moderation analysis have confirmed statistically significant positive interaction between consuming and loyalty variables when moderators are brands from supermarket domains. In other cases, the interactions between brand engagement levels and brand equity dimensions were negative.
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