Lurk or De-Lurk?: The Role of Participation Type and Sport Fanaticism in Understanding the Link Between Brand Community Identification and Oppositional Brand Loyalty

Introduction

Companies have invested significantly in marketing through social media to increase brand awareness as a new advertising medium in recent years (Liao et al., 2020). Sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram allow users to communicate with each other knowledge about brands and engage with them (Reyes-Mercado & Barajas-Portas, 2020). These media are platforms that improve content via text, images, audio, and video; it is indeed a supplement to marketing efforts in attempting to attract more customers, and it is one of the most rapidly growing content channels in the 21^st century (Alalwan, 2018). This form of marketing concentrates efforts on generating content that attracts consumers' interest and motivates them to interact via platforms such as Facebook to target a greater number of consumers in an automated way without any need to upgrade or post the content regularly (Chu et al., 2013).

Additionally, persons can use social media sites to communicate with one another and develop social interactions through the web (Hook et al., 2018). The characteristic of sharing, or retweeting, of posts that the marketer creates if the consumer is interested in the content, makes social media one of the most successful tools of advertising (Kuo & Hou, 2017). This allows the brand’s message to reach a large number of people in a very short amount of time and without difficulty if these tools are used correctly; and social networking encompasses a wealth of information about the services and products that potential customers might be interested in, which is easily reachable and targets users' preferences and impacts their intent to buy (Neti, 2011).

Besides, the uses and gratification theory (UGT) is used as a theoretical approach in this study to better explain why and how individuals try to find out, select, and utilize certain media to meet specific social and personal desires (Dessart & Veloutsou, 2021). This theory appears to be true in online settings, such as online brand communities (BOCs) (de Vries & Carlson, 2014). Moreover, brand community success essentially depends on customer loyalty and brand community identification as an item resulting in it (Dessart & Veloutsou, 2021). Facebook, in particular, is one of the most widely used social networking platforms to connect with companies and to build OBCs (Hook et al., 2018). The brand generally aims to encourage participation by sharing vivid, engaging, instructive, and fascinating content (de Vries et al., 2012), and company-generated content has a link with users' participation (Shahbaznezhad & Rashidirad, 2020). Furthermore, there exists a lack of research on online brand communities. The majority of studies are on brand community identification (BCI) and two shapes of loyalty; that is, sustainable brand loyalty (Dessart & Veloutsou, 2021) and oppositional brand loyalty (Dessart et al., 2016) in OBCs as conducted in areas with high levels of participation (active posters). So, one of the primary goals of this research is to determine the moderating role of type of participation between brand community identification and oppositional brand loyalty.