Romancing the Brands on Social Media

Abstract

Previous studies on emotional attachment with brands have overlooked the importance of brand romance in such relationships. Research has provided ample evidence that suggests brand romance can also strengthen brand loyalty. With the emergence of social media marketing (SMM) in managing consumer-brand relationships, it becomes critical to study the role of SMM in building brand romance. This study is an attempt to study the influence of SMM on Brand Romance and Brand loyalty. Further, this study also examines the mediating role played by brand romance between SMM and brand loyalty. This research has measured SMM as a second order construct which also makes this study unique. This study used quantitative research design targeting luxury consumers in four metropolitan cities in India which has a growing luxury consumer population. This survey targeted 400 customers using convenience sampling method which resulted in 223 functional responses. Both reliability and validity tests were conducted on measurement scales before conducting factor analysis. The relationships were tested using path analysis in SEM which revealed the positive direct influence of SMM on brand romance, direct influence of brand romance on brand loyalty and positive direct influence of SMM on brand loyalty. The results also revealed the full mediation of brand pleasure and partial mediation by both brand arousal and brand dominance in the relationship between SMM and brand loyalty. This study has important marketing implication for marketers which are exploiting social media for promoting their brands and further cementing consumer-brand relationship. Future studies can extend this study to other product and service segments which are more experiential in nature.

Social media and luxury: A systematic literature review

“…Luxury brands should not only adopt social media platforms in their branding activities, but also endeavour to understand the personal motivations of users in engaging with luxury brands' online communities to maximize the effectiveness of these efforts (Zollo et al, 2020) and avoid the aforementioned negative effects on value perception that a decrease in psychological distance can incur (Park et al, 2020). Social media platforms have been found to elicit positive effects on a variety of consumer outcomes, including perception (Lee & Watkins, 2016;Lee et al, 2018), reputation (Castellano & Khelladi, 2016), awareness, image, loyalty (Godey et al, 2016), exclusivity (Xie & Lou, 2020) and romance (Beig & Khan, 2020), but can also foster negativity, even hate, towards brands (Atwal et al, 2020;Pantano, 2021).…”

“…Within social media, this could equate to content offering backstage insights, legacy narratives or craftsmanship imagery (Xie & Lou, 2020), with image and video being more effective content forms in influencing reputation (Castellano & Khelladi, 2016). Although evidence has been found supporting multiple social media marketing dimensions' effectiveness in luxury brands' social media activities (Kim & Ko, 2012;Liu et al, 2021), entertainment has the highest influence in building and influencing luxury brands' social media presence (Beig & Khan, 2020). It is also the best predictor of social media users consuming and contributing to brandrelated content, while interaction is the best predictor of users creating their own content for brands (Cheung et al, 2021).…”

The development and validation of the Indian social media addiction scale

“…Through its revolutionary virtual platforms, social media has completely transformed the means and ways people interact with each other (Beig and Khan, 2018;Beig and Khan, 2020;Cao et al, 2020;Klobas et al, 2018a, b;Lee et al, 2017;Olanrewaju et al, 2020;Saqib and Amin, 2022). Over the years, the emerging digital upheaval in smartphones, electronic wearable devices, etc., has led billions of people to use social media (Michael and Agur, 2018).…”

Social media marketing, shoppers' store love and loyalty

“…An exhaustive search of previous studies on SMMA reveals that a moderator was hardly introduced in a causal map. Many researchers suggested adding sociodemographic variables as moderators (Ibrahim et al, 2021;Sharma et al, 2021); specifically, Beig and Khan (2020) explicitly recommended including "social media usage." The lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic has forced consumers to explore digital means of communication in all aspects of their life and experience a higher intensity of social media usage than ever before.…”