The Impact of Brand Communication on Brand Equity Dimensions and Brand Purchase Intention Through Facebook

Companies are now using social networking sites, such as Facebook, to enhance their brand communication and to promote and disseminate their product information among consumers. Such brands as Coca-Cola, Converse, and Starbucks reach millions of people through their social media communication; however, companies do not have complete control over this phenomenon. Consumers actively “like” brands, comment on posts, share information and share their opinions with other people on the Internet. The purpose of this study is to fill the gaps in the discussion of the ways in which firm-created and user-generated social media communication techniques impact consumer-based brand dimensions through Facebook. Moreover, we studied brand purchase intentions to achieve a behavioral understanding of the influence of these two communication instruments. We evaluated 302 data sets that were generated through a standardized online-survey to investigate the impact of social media communication on brand equity metrics. We subsequently applied structural equation modeling techniques for data analysis. The results of our empirical studies showed that user-generated social media communication had a positive impact on two measures of consumer-based brand equity, which included brand loyalty and perceived brand quality. In addition, the analysis indicated that firm-created social media communication had no influence on consumers’ brand purchase intention. This study also offers valuable insights for brand managers and scholars.[For the full version please see the paper published in: Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing 9/1 http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1108/JRIM-02-2014-0007 ]