Purpose The potential outcomes of social media-facilitated customer–brand relationships have prompted many firms to develop strategies that would enable them to connect with as many customers as possible through social media. Nevertheless, the marketing value of these artificial connections is questionable. Therefore, this paper aims to identify determinants of customers’ intention to connect with a brand on social media (i.e. Facebook) in the absence of “pull-strategies”. Design/methodology/approach In this paper, the concept of customer–brand engagement (CBE) is applied to the intentions to “Like” a brand’s Facebook fan page using structural equation modelling. Findings The results show that the three dimensions of CBE collectively explain about 50 per cent of the intentions to “Like” a brand’s Facebook fan page. Additionally, the results show that the influences of two of the CBE dimensions on the two “Like”-intentions are conditional effects of brand trust. Originality/value Because of the novelty of the CBE construct, further investigation of its application in a social media setting is lacking. To address this gap in the literature, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how CBE influences customers’ intention to “Like” a brand’s Facebook page.

Purpose Shopping statistics indicate that online shoppers prefer purchasing products using the desktop website of the retailer, rather than using the mobile website on a mobile phone to purchase products (mobile website purchasing). Therefore, using status quo bias theory, this study aims to investigate mobile website purchasing resistance of those customers using only desktop website purchasing. Design/methodology/approach To test the conceptual model an online questionnaire was used to collect data from customers purchasing products using only the desktop website on a computer (n = 484) and not the retailer’s mobile website. Findings Due to cognitive dissonance, customers using only desktop purchasing trivialize mobile website purchasing perceived attractiveness while perceiving more cognitive effort in mobile website purchasing to maintain consonance with their inertia. Further, relative advantage perceptions of mobile website purchasing lead to more trivialization of mobile website purchasing attractiveness perceptions. Desktop purchasing inertia enhances resistance through alternative attractiveness and cognitive effort perceptions, respectively, and cognitive effort and alternative attractiveness perceptions in serial. Desktop purchasing habit has the strongest positive influence on desktop purchasing inertia. Research limitations/implications This study was conducted in a high-involvement product context. Replication in a low-involvement product context is necessary to confirm the robustness of the results. Practical implications Retailers can use the findings to develop strategies to lower mobile website purchasing resistance in an online-mobile concurrent channel environment. Originality/value The study provides novel insights into mobile website purchasing resistance in an online-mobile concurrent channel environment. Further, the study addresses the gap in research on inertia and switching costs in the adoption of concurrent channels.

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