Romancing the Brands on Social Media

Previous studies on emotional attachment with brands have overlooked the importance of brand romance in such relationships. Research has provided ample evidence that suggests brand romance can also strengthen brand loyalty. With the emergence of social media marketing (SMM) in managing consumer-brand relationships, it becomes critical to study the role of SMM in building brand romance. This study is an attempt to study the influence of SMM on Brand Romance and Brand loyalty. Further, this study also examines the mediating role played by brand romance between SMM and brand loyalty. This research has measured SMM as a second order construct which also makes this study unique. This study used quantitative research design targeting luxury consumers in four metropolitan cities in India which has a growing luxury consumer population. This survey targeted 400 customers using convenience sampling method which resulted in 223 functional responses. Both reliability and validity tests were conducted on measurement scales before conducting factor analysis. The relationships were tested using path analysis in SEM which revealed the positive direct influence of SMM on brand romance, direct influence of brand romance on brand loyalty and positive direct influence of SMM on brand loyalty. The results also revealed the full mediation of brand pleasure and partial mediation by both brand arousal and brand dominance in the relationship between SMM and brand loyalty. This study has important marketing implication for marketers which are exploiting social media for promoting their brands and further cementing consumer-brand relationship. Future studies can extend this study to other product and service segments which are more experiential in nature.