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Top1. Introduction
With the integration of Internet-based social life and business, social commerce is soaring (Wu, Quyen, & Rivas, 2017). Publications recently have become more focus on studying social commerce (Kapoor, Tamilmani, Rana, Patil, Dwivedi, & Nerur, 2018). For those firms who pursue their performance in social commerce, the issue of consumer engagement and how it further contributes in creating deeper and more lasting customer brand relationships has emerged (Kumar et al., 2010). As a typical type of e-WOM (Ismagilova, Dwivedi, Slade, & Williams, 2017), online review is a main channel for consumers to present their attitudes or preferences towards a brand of all the commercial activities in social commerce context (Liang & Turban, 2011), which also additionally enable customers to narrow the gap and diminish vulnerability for their choices (Mauri & Minazzi, 2013).
Online reviews on the social commerce website are useful, yet the genuineness and trustworthiness of the analysts often are doubted by the consumers (Shan, 2016). Research has demonstrated that users make their decisions depending on personal data about the commentators, for example, analyzing their profile to decide the helpfulness of their reviews (Forman et al., 2008; Liu & Park, 2015), implying that customers don't allocate the same value to the data given by various people. Yaniv et al. (2011) suggested that customers like people who have similarity with themselves because similarity can build trust and reliability in the context of the face-to-face situation (He& Bond, 2013; Yaniv et al., 2011). An industry overview demonstrates that 73% of customers concur that “people like me” are the most believable exhortation when making decisions (Marsden, 2009). Hence, we argue that the similarity effect also exists with regards to social business and take online reviews-related perception (perceived utilitarian and hedonic value) as motivational factors (Tamilmani, Rana, Prakasam, & Dwivedi, 2019) to influence consumer engagement.
In brand relationship researches, other customers or the third person of the brand were positioned as non-product related attributes (Keller, 1993), impalpable resources (Kim & Ko, 2012), or external communicators that are beyond the control of the organization (Bhattacharya & Sen, 2003). As indicated by Martin (1996), consumers impact each other either straightforwardly through relational experiences or by implication by being part of the whole environment. Despite there is no interaction with other consumers in these indirect experiences, they might be increasingly pervasive and affect consumer to pick this brand (Ferraro et al., 2009). The consumer-based segment of social commerce involves how consumers' impression of other consumers' attributes and further impact their actions toward the brand (Brocato et al., 2012). In this respect, we take the brand-related psychological perception (self-image congruence and self-brand congruence) as another type of factors to affect customer brand engagement in the social commerce website.
Identifying the driving forces that influence customer brand engagement could encourage the scholars and marketers gain knowledge into how to deal with online reviewers towards a brand in the social commerce website. Although online reviews in e-commerce are referenced in several studies (Lui, Bartosiak, Piccoli, & Sadhya, 2018; Mudambi, & Schuff, 2010; Ismagilova et al., 2017; Siering, Muntermann, & Rajagopalan,2018; Tamilmani, et al., 2019; Topaloglu, & Dass, 2019), few studies have explored customer brand engagement from the perspective of reviewer-reader similarity (Akhtar, Kim, Ahmad, Akhtar, Siddiqi, & Riaz, 2019; Chan, Lam, Chow, Fong, &Law, 2017)) and its psychological mechanisms in social commerce context. Therefore, we argue that reviewer-reader similarity (external and internal similarity) in online reviews is crucial cues for customers who are willing to engage a brand in social commerce website.
The results of the quantitative analysis of PLS suggested that both external and internal similarity altogether influenced consumer brand engagement. External similarity exerted a more profound influence on consumers' perceived value, whereas internal similarity exerted a more profound influence on consumers' self-brand congruence, and finally both influenced consumers’ brand engagement intention. Perceived utilitarian value and self-brand congruence mediated the relationship between reviewer-reader similarity and consumer brand engagement. This paper is an important contribution to academic marketing literature in the field of customer brand engagement and social psychological literature in the field of similarity effect, and provides useful managerial insights for marketing practitioners.