Exploring how customer engagement is involved in branding based on UGT theory and S-O-R framework

Different brands have created their own brand communities to build customer-brand relationships in social networks to communicate and promote their new products to customers and encourage them to collaborate. Brand communities as a marketing tool facilitate social exchange among customers. The purpose of this study was to investigate how customer engagement is involved in effective branding collaboration in social media. This research was applied in terms of purpose and descriptive-survey in terms of method. The statistical population of the study included all students of Kharazmi University in Tehran who have an account in one of the social media. Among them, 216 students of Kharazmi University were selected through the available sampling method and the data were collected through a standard questionnaire. Data analysis was performed using the structural equation modeling method in PLS software. The results showed that engagement motivation (motivation to create a relationship, search for entertainment, information search, and visual aesthetics) had a positive effect on customer engagement in the brand community on the social media. The positive and significant impact of customer engagement in brand social media on brand trust, brand loyalty, and word-of-mouth advertising was also confirmed. But, the effect of word-of-mouth advertising in social media brand community on collaboration wasn’t confirmed.