Fostering brand love in Facebook brand pages

Pages710-727
Date09 September 2019
Published date09 September 2019
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-05-2017-0175
AuthorMariola Palazon,Elena Delgado-Ballester,Maria Sicilia
Subject MatterLibrary & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Bibliometrics,Databases,Information & knowledge management,Information & communications technology,Internet,Records management & preservation,Document management
Fostering brand love in Facebook
brand pages
Mariola Palazon, Elena Delgado-Ballester and
Maria Sicilia
Department of Marketing, School of Business and Economics,
University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze how brand love is built in the context of brand pages by
proposing a model in which brand love depends on relationships ties with other brand consumers (sense of
brand community) and with the brand itself (selfbrand connection).
Design/methodology/approach Information was collected from a sample of 559 members of the
community of a well-known baby food brand on Facebook. Data were collected through an online
questionnaire sent by the company.
Findings Results suggest that both sense of brand community and selfbrand connection foster brand love
and that selfbrand connection exerts a mediating role between sense of brand community and brand love.
Furthermore, the effect of brand community on brand love is conditioned by a personal trait of individuals
such as brand engagement in self-concept. In addition, this study identifies a new consequence of brand love
not previously analyzed in the literature: brand equity.
Research limitations/implications A potential shortcoming is the product category analyzed and that
the length of membership was not controlled and it may be a moderator between participation and
community consequences.
Practical implications The key implications are the importance of nurturing relationship ties among
brand users and building selfbrand connections on brand pages as precursors of brand love.
Originality/value The study offers empirical evidence about the mechanism through which brand love is
formed on social-media platforms such as Facebook. Furthermore, the authors have demonstrated the
relationship between brand love and brand equity, which had not been examined yet in the literature.
Keywords Brand love, Brand pages, Brand engagement in self-concept, Selfbrand connection,
Sense of brand community
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Social network sites (SNSs) have enabled consumers to engage more with brands and other
consumers. In this context, companies have developed official Facebook pages for their
brands. Brand pages canbe considered a new form of online brand community embedded in
SNSs (Habibi et al., 2014a), which is considered a group of individuals with common interests
in a brand, who communicate with eachother electronically (Siciliaand Palazon, 2008). These
communities perform many importanttasks on behalf of the brand (Habibiet al., 2014b) such
as sharing information (Mamonov et al., 2016), perpetuating the history and culture of the
brand and providingassistance to consumers (Laroche et al., 2012). Furthermore, communi ty
members can help to defend thebrand, make desirable brand impressions andprovide ideas
for innovation and product improvements (Habibi et al., 2014a).
Brand pages have emerged as an important form on online brand community because of
the interactive and networked nature of social media (Turri et al., 2013). They give
consumers a feeling of belongingness and empower them to express their sentiments about
the brand to different shoppers and diminish the mental separation between consumers and
Online Information Review
Vol. 43 No. 5, 2019
pp. 710-727
© Emerald PublishingLimited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/OIR-05-2017-0175
Received 31 May 2017
Revised 23 May 2018
13 September 2018
Accepted 28 October 2018
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/1468-4527.htm
The authors thank the editor and the two reviewers for their helpful comments. This research was
supported by the grant ECO2017-83999-R from the Spanish Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI)
and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).
710
OIR
43,5
the brand (Kudeshia et al., 2016). Consequently, social media platforms such as Facebook are
viewed as a valuable context for building consumerbrand relationships (Schamari and
Schaefers, 2015).
Strong consumerbrand relationships are characterized by feelings much greater than
mere brand preferences that support relationship stability and durability (Fournier, 1988).
In particular, brand love has recently been raised in the branding literature to set a new
standard in relation to the existence of strong consumerbrand relationships at a more
emotional level (Batra et al., 2012). However, while brand pages are viewed as a marketing
tool to create emotional bonds between consumers and brands (Schamari and Schaefers,
2015), their role in fostering brand love is in its early stages (Vernuccio et al., 2015).
Specifically, Hudson et al. (2016) claim more research efforts in understanding
consumerbrand relationships in social media by including emerging concepts such as
brand love. Furthermore, the mechanisms mediating and moderating brand community
effects on these relationships remain uncharted (Zhou et al., 2012).
This study addresses all these concerns. Since the roots of brand community
development reside on sociology and social psychology (Muñiz and OGuinn, 2001),
hypotheses formulation is based on two social theories: social identity theory and
self-expansion theory. Social identity theory (Tajfel and Turner, 1979) is used because brand
communities are becoming more and more important in defining consumer identities, as
they contribute to a form of shared or collective identity (Muñiz and OGuinn, 2001). We also
use self-expansion theory (Aron and Aron, 1986) as a background theory for this study
because it deals with how people feel in the context of close relationships, as the ones that
may occur between individuals who admire a brand within a community as well as between
those individuals and the brand itself (Carroll and Ahuvia, 2006; Fournier, 1988; Reimann
and Aron, 2009). Theoretical development results in a model in which brand love depends on
relationships ties with other brand consumers of the community (sense of brand
community) and with the brand itself (selfbrand connection).
By doing so, this study goes a step further than Hudson et al. (2016), Vernuccio et al.
(2015) and Zhou et al. (2012) by proposing two new antecedents of brand love in the context
of brand pages: sense of brand community and selfbrand connection. In relation to sense of
brand community, research on traditional offline communities has emphasized the focal role
of sense of community among community members, yet there has been relatively little work
on its role in online communities (Mamonov et al., 2016). For instance, Turri et al. (2013)
observed that emotional relationships were cultivated by the intimacy and self-connection a
consumer has toward the brand, but ignored the effect that the relationships with other
consumers may have on the emotional commitment with the brand.
Finally, another contribution resides in the inclusion of brand engagement in self-concept
(BESC) as a moderating variable and a new outcome variable of brand love not considered
by previous studies: brand equity. Overall, the results obtained will provide managers with
valuable guidelines to design social media strategies that will strengthen consumerbrand
relationships in terms of brand love.
Brand pages and brand love
Brand pages have emerged as a widely accepted channel for companies to communicate and
interact with their consumers and share information in the form of posts. They have been
the subject of active research in information systems (Mamonov et al., 2016). To date, extant
research has provided empirical evidence related to: the effects that participation in brand
pages has on trust, sense of community and community identification (Habibi et al., 2014a;
Mamonov et al., 2016), consumerspurchase decisions (Kudeshia et al., 2016), word-of-mouth
behavior (Kudeshia et al., 2016; Royo-Vela and Casamassima, 2011) and brand loyalty
(Laroche et al., 2012); the process underlying the development of consumer loyalty to brand
711
Brand love in
Facebook
brand pages

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