Abstract:
Online customer brand engagement (OCBE) has become an important relationship marketing construct within the realm of academics, as well as with practitioners. The emanating literature on OCBE offers diverse definitions, but those that are often presented without a mutual agreement. The extant literature based on this particular discipline primarily focused on the aspect of relationship marketing, with respect to retaining customers. But with the addition of customer engagement, it was not only confined towards maintaining customer retention, but also ventured into the subject of attracting new customers. This paper aims to validate a nomological set of theoretical relationships that include OCBE, brand involvement (BI), and emotional brand engagement (EBA). It provides a new outcome, EBA that has also been suggested in the previous studies. Also, it is noteworthy that this study has undertaken before brand usage intent that is used as a valid outcome. This study is exploratory in nature, and is limited to a base of customers who are engaged with a brand, by simply liking it on Facebook. In this regard, a survey of 302 respondents provided data, by resorting to purposive sampling between the age groups of 18 – 55 years. Brand involvement is an antecedent of OCBE, and emotional brand attachment (EBA) was the outcome that was achieved. A further validation of this outcome was done through the mediation analysis, which concluded that only the affective dimension of OCBE had a mediating effect on the EBA. The affective dimension of OCBE has the most effect on the outcome variable EBA, as compared to the cognitive processing and activation dimensions of OCBE. This study concluded that marketers could perhaps devise social media strategies, in order to engage customers through emotions, and as a result help increase customer retention and loyalty.
