Brand reputation and customer voluntary sharing behavior: the intervening roles of self-expressive brand perceptions and status seeking
| Date | 10 June 2020 |
| Pages | 565-578 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JPBM-12-2019-2670 |
| Published date | 10 June 2020 |
| Author | Laee Choi,Thomas Burnham |
Brand reputation and customer voluntary
sharing behavior: the intervening roles of
self-expressive brand perceptions and
status seeking
Laee Choi
Malik and Seeme Hasan School of Business, Colorado State University - Pueblo, Pueblo, Colorado, USA, and
Thomas Burnham
Department of Marketing, University of Nevada Reno, Reno, Nevada, USA
Abstract
Purpose –Prior research studying the mechanisms by which brand reputation influences consumer behaviors has largely relied on
respondent measures of brand reputation, resulting in an inability to ascertain the causal direction of relationships. Using third party
measures, this paper aims to study the effects of brand reputation, via self-expressive brand perceptions, on bot h firm-directed and other
customer-directed customer voluntary sharing behaviors (CVSB). It then assesses the moderating effect of consumer status-seeking on the
relationships studied.
Design/methodology/approach –To prevent common method bias and substantiate causality claims, a third-party brand reputation
measure is combined with a consumer survey. Process is used to test the hypo theses using 359 consumer responses collected via Amazon
MTurk.
Findings –The results indicate that higher inner-self and social-self expressive perceptions derived from stron g brand reputations increase
consumer knowledge sharing and social influence behaviors. The effect of social-self expressive brand perceptions on CVSB is positively moderated
by consumer status-seeking.
Practical implications –Firms should leverage existing brand reputation investments to strengthen customer perceptions of their brands as self-
expressive and facilitate greater social and knowledge-sharing engagement by status-seeking consumers.
Originality/value –This study identifies a new mechanism linking brand reputation and CVSB: consumer perceptions of the self-expressiveness of
brands. Moreover, it distinguishes the effects of two dimensions of brand self-expressiveness and substantiates the customer engagement behavior
value of investing in brand reputation as measured by third parties.
Keywords Customer voluntary sharing behavior, Customer engagement, Brand reputation, Self-expressive brand, Inner-self, Social-self,
Status seeking
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Prosocial, voluntary customer engagement behaviors have
received attention lately as crucial resources that enhance firm
profitability and brand performance (Carlson et al.,2019;Roy
et al.,2018). Such customer engagement is seen as a strategic
imperative because it can result in a sustainable competitive
advantage for firms (Ostrom et al.,2015). In pursuit of such
advantage, firms invest effort to actively engage their
customers. Increasing customers’prosocial, voluntary
engagement, however, is difficult because such behavior
requires customers to voluntarily invest non-monetary
resources (i.e. time and effort) (Roy et al.,2018) without the
motivation of explicit self-benefit. Hence, the prospect of
leveraging brand reputation investments to increase such
engagement is an attractiveproposition.
Kumar and Pansari (2016) offer a holistic perspective of
customer engagement as encompassing four types of
consumer behaviors, i.e. purchasing, incentivized referrals,
social influence and knowledge/feedback sharing.
According to engagement theory (Pansari and Kumar,
2017), customer engagement expands the focus of
marketing management from a transaction (direct
purchase contribution) perspective to richer relationship
perspective that includes indirect forms of customer
contribution that can benefitthefirm. However, Verhoef
et al. (2010) and van Doorn et al. (2010) promote a
narrower definition of engagement behaviors, arguing that
customer engagement only includes behavior that goes
The current issue and full text archiveof this journal is available on Emerald
Insight at: https://www.emerald.com/insight/1061-0421.htm
Journal of Product & Brand Management
29/2 (2021) 565–578
© Emerald Publishing Limited [ISSN 1061-0421]
[DOI 10.1108/JPBM-12-2019-2670]
Received 4 December 2019
Revised 19 March 2020
15 May 2020
Accepted 18 May 2020
565
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