Abstract
Consumer brand engagement enhances consumer loyalty and consumer satisfaction, empowerment, connection and emotional bonds, trust, and commitment. Given the consequences of consumer brand engagement, this chapter explores consumers' online engagement with a political party, its online content creators, and other community members. The findings reveal that the developed strategies engage consumers differently with regard to the affective, cognitive, and behavioral dimensions of consumer brand engagement, creating different forms of consumer communities.
TopBackground
The construct of engagement has been explored by scholars from different disciplines including psychology, sociology, information systems, political sciences and organizational behavior (e.g. Resnick, 2001; Kahn, 1990; Achterberg et al., 2003; Jennings and Stocker, 2004). Each discipline has used the construct of engagement with respect to discipline relevant subjects and objects such as social engagement in psychology (Achterberg et al., 2003), civic engagement in sociology (Jennings and Stocker, 2004) and employee engagement in organizational behavior (Kahn, 1990). In the marketing discipline the construct initially appeared in the literature of brand communities to express consumers’ interactions with brands as well as with other consumers of the same brand (Algesheimer et al., 2005). Building on the engagement research on other social sciences, consumer engagement has been defined as “a psychological state that occurs through interactive, co-creative consumer experiences with a focal agent/object” (Brodie et al., 2011, p. 2).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Brand Communities: Online or offline communities formed by consumers to express their common love and devotion about the same brand.
Social media: Contemporary digital channel that allows quick, inexpensive, real time communication among different stakeholders.
Online Brand Engagement: Online interactions that consumers have with brand engagement objects.
Objects of Brand Engagement or Brand Engagement Objects: Depending on the context of study, it refers to the object or objects that consumers get engaged with such as a brand, a product, a service, an organization, an idea, an experience, an individual and/or a group of consumers.
Generation Y Consumers: Due to size, economic power and interest in consumption an attractive young age cohort either at college or at the early stages of their professional career.
Online Political Party Engagement: Online interactions that consumers have with a political party, its online content creators and other voters.
Dimensions of Brand Engagement: Consumers’ affective, cognitive and behavioral manifestations towards a brand.