Social Media Brand Community and Consumer Purchase: a Cross-Brand Analysis

Social media brand communities have been widely adopted by marketers as a marketing channel to engage consumers, and by consumers as a source of product/brand information prior to their purchase decisions. The popularity of social media brand communities has attracted some academic research efforts. However, there still exist important research gaps to be addressed in the existing literature. First, previous studies only focused on the impact of consumers’ engagement in the community of a brand on their purchases from that particular brand. However, consumers could have preference for multiple brands within a product class. As such, the impact of engagement in the community of a brand on consumers’ purchases from other preferred alternative brands remains unknown. Second, previous studies implicitly assumed that consumers only engage in a single community of a preferred brand. However, consumers would engage in multiple communities of multiple preferred brands within a product class. As such, the impact of consumers’ engagement in communities of multiple similar brands on their purchases from those engaged brands also remains unknown. This study thus proposes a set of research hypotheses, aiming to fill these research gaps. The findings from this study would offer several notable theoretical contributions.