Content area
Full Text
Introduction
What makes consumers engage with a brand? How can brands consistently interact with customers to become their first choice when the brand's category is evoked in the consumer's mind? These are quintessential questions for which brand managers and marketing researchers have been seeking answers for some time now. However, in the modern hyperconnected digital world of the consumer, these questions take on a slightly different complexion. Electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) has replaced traditional word-of-mouth (Prasad et al., 2019), and consumers no longer trust brands for information on products and services. Instead, they rely on other consumers who have rated products, commented on them or posted extensive reviews on various sites (Al-Htibat and Garanti, 2019). This study attempts to unravel this linkage between eWOM and engagement.
The Internet and social media are witnessing lots of activity in the form of online recommendation engines, user-generated content (UGC) and automated marketing activity by brands. Despite the sophistication of the tools employed by brands (e.g. retargeting, programmatic advertising, customer journey mapping), customers still rely on the testimonials of other customers. In a study conducted across 60 countries, online reviews were rated as one of the most trustworthy sources of information (Nielsen, 2015). Another study states that recommendations have a more substantial influence than product features (Gaspar and Hofman, 2013).
Brands are thus realising that merely being available to their prospective consumers when they search for them online is not good enough. Ongoing interactions with consumers are becoming imperative to influence repurchase. These online interactions have been conceptualised in marketing literature as consumer brand engagement (CBE). An engaged customer group may become a brand ambassador for a particular business (Augar and Zeleznikow, 2014). As defined by Van Doorn et al. (2010), “customer engagement behaviours go beyond transactions, and maybe specifically defined as a customer's behavioural manifestations that have a brand or firm focus, beyond purchase, resulting from motivational drivers”.
The advent of the Internet and social media has radically transformed the role of the consumer from a passive recipient of information provided by brands to a more active experiencer and creator of content. Today's consumers observe, participate, interact and co-create with brands and also with other consumers (Labrecque et al., 2013). This interaction also takes the form of...