The role of brand community identification and reward on consumer brand engagement and brand loyalty in virtual brand communities

Abstract

With the advent of interactive Web 2.0 (and beyond) technologies, the role of consumer brand engagement (CBE), which focuses on the consumer's investment in their brand interactions, is of rapidly growing importance. Despite growing recognition of CBE's importance in virtual brand communities, empirically-derived insight into its drivers, dynamics, and outcomes remains limited, as investigated in this study. Responding to this gap, we explore the effect of consumers’ brand community identification and reward on CBE, which we posit to subsequently affect brand loyalty. To investigate our hypotheses, we conducted a survey with 602 Facebook users. Our structural equation modeling results reveal brand community identification's and reward's positive effect on CBE, and a positive effect of CBE on brand loyalty. In addition, our findings reveal CBE's partial mediating effect in the association of brand community identification and reward with brand loyalty. Theoretically, our findings further insight into CBE's virtual community-based dynamics, with a focus on the role of community identification and reward. Practically, our results identify the key role of nurturing virtual community identification and the offering of reward to engage consumers.