Brand Loyalty’s Impact on Customer Engagement in Virtual Brand Communities: By the case of Turkish Market

Abstract

Customer engagement, in recent years, has received substantial attention by marketing practitioners and scholars in accordance with the rise in awareness that customers are the value co-creators rather than value recipients. With the recognition that customer experiences add significant value to the firm, companies seek ways to interact with their customers reciprocally so that the value that both the firm and the customer receive can be maximized. Accordingly, scholars argue that marketing view has shifted from marketing-to to marketing-with approach; therefore, customer engagement has become an essential constituent of a sound marketing strategy. The Marketing Science Institute (MSI) affirms the prominence of the customer engagement concept and announces customer engagement as one of the top research priorities for the period 2010-2012 (Marketing Science Institute [MSI] 2010). Despite this interest, there are few scholars inquiring the main antecedents which are directly linked to customer engagement. The main focus of this master thesis is to investigate brand loyalty as one of the main antecedents of customer engagement. More specifically, this paper examines brand loyalty‘s impact on customer engagement. Moreover, with the rise in popularity of online brand communities where firms are able to interact with their consumers for co-creation marketing activities, virtual brand communities have been chosen as the context of the current study. For the purpose of analyzing brand loyalty as an antecedent of customer engagement in online brand communities, a quantitative study is undertaken and a survey is conducted to Turkish consumers. The study reports the findings analyzing data from 193 respondents who are members of various Facebook brand pages. The study results reveal direct paths from brand loyalty dimensions to customer engagement dimensions. Overall, the current study finds the brand loyalty as the direct trigger which leads to various intensity levels of customer engagement on online brand communities. Consequently, the implications for literature and business practice are discussed based on study results.