Co-Creating Brand Value Through Social Commerce

Introduction

In the social media era, consumers have empowered to exert an influence on brands through various social media platforms, such as social networking sites (SNSs) and online forums. Recent estimates from a report show that on SNSs such as Facebook, clicking on the “like” button by a user is worth $174.17 for a brand page - a 28 percent increase since 2010 (Scissons, Kalehoff, & Laufer, 2013). This implies that a significant brand value is facilitated by online consumers’ tendencies (Naylor, Lamberton, & West, 2012). Social commerce, the powerful combination of customer-oriented social computing technologies and the rising social networking effect in an online environment, has been portrayed as a means of managing a brand (Gensler, Volckner, Liu-Thompkins, & Wiertz, 2013; Yadav, de Valck, Hennig-Thurau, Hoffman, & Spann, 2013). Social commerce creates an environment where consumers are turned into brand ambassadors by leveraging a series of collective, co-creational processes with other consumers in a virtual manner (Holt, 2003; Cayla & Arnould, 2008). Such an environment might have the potential to not only influence consumers’ intentions and behavior to adopt a brand through social interactions and relationships but also increase companies’ sales growth and brand values (Gensler et al., 2013; Pentina, Gammoh, Zhang, & Mallin, 2013).

Although the existing branding literature is abundant in the field of marketing management, understanding whether brands can co-create with consumers through social commerce remains a research question that still requires attention. Previous studies considering the context of social commerce have found that a lack of social capital is the predominant reason why online customers hesitate to make decisions to purchase products (Liang, Ho, Li, & Turban, 2011). Some researchers have denoted to study whether social capital factors will affect customers’ intentions to co-creation in branding (Hajli, 2015; Hajli et al., 2014; Kim & Park, 2013; Liang et al., 2011). Nevertheless, this path of effects has not been studied explicitly in the literature. Thus, drawing on social support theory and relationship marketing theory, the first purpose of this study is to examine the inter-relationships among relationship quality and social support on co-creating brand value intentions in the social commerce environment.

Social commerce constructs such as forums and communities, ratings and reviews, and referrals and recommendations are important elements for these social capital factors (Hajli, 2015). With the constructs of social commerce serving as a construct, it not only increases the understanding of social commerce constructs per se and its impact on members’ intention but also differentiates social commerce from other online business environments (Hajli, 2013; Kim & Park, 2013). Thus, there is a need to empirically examine the impacts of these social commerce constructs (Ba & Pavlou, 2002; Hajli, 2013; Hajli, Lin, Featherman, & Wang, 2014). In this regard, the second purpose of this study is to treat the social commerce constructs as an antecedent variable, which is causally related to the effect of relationship quality and social support, which in turn, the intention to co-creation in branding.