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Introduction
The increasing importance of online social networks among customers has made it an imperative on the part of marketers to launch online brand communities to facilitate customer–brand and customer–customer interactions and add more value to the firms (Woisetschläger et al., 2008; Baldus et al., 2015). An online brand community is an informal group of brand admirers who share social relationships created around a brand (Muñiz and O’Guinn, 2001; Jang et al., 2008; Stokburger‐Sauer, 2010). The informal nature of social relationships necessitates the engagement of customers for the survival of brand communities. Engagement in the community [1] here refers to a positive disposition towards the “brand” and the “brand community” (Dessart et al., 2016). Customer engagement received focused attention in online brand communities in the recognition of the fact that customers can easily switch communities by merely touching a few buttons in the digital age (Wirtz et al., 2013). A high value has been attributed to customers’ engagement in virtual brand communities by both the academicians and the practitioners (Brodie et al., 2011, 2013; Gummerus et al., 2012; Hollebeek et al., 2014; Carvalho and Fernandes, 2018).
Despite the increasing popularity, research on customer engagement in brand communities remains in its infancy in terms of focus on the “object” of engagement. Considering customer/consumer as the “subject” of engagement, few studies focus on “brand” as the engagement object (Hollebeek et al., 2014; Carvalho and Fernandes, 2018), while others focus on “brand community” as the engagement object (Zheng et al., 2015; Bowden et al., 2018). It is only recently when engagement in a community is essentially termed as the engagement with the community and the focal brand (Wirtz et al., 2013; Dessart et al., 2015, 2016; Dessart, 2017). Literature is scant of the studies attributing importance to customer–brand engagement and customer–community engagement in brand communities and of answers to how to achieve it. Hence, the broad objective of this study is to explore customer engagement with dual objects, i.e. the brand and the brand community and to identify the drivers behind this positive disposition (engagement) with the brand and the community. Noticeably, customer engagement research remains in its nascent state in terms of the identification...