Social Media Marketing as a Tool for Disruptive
Startup Branding
Faculty of Economics & Business
MSc. Business Administration – Digital Business Track Supervisor: Dr. Shameek Sinha
Jurre Kuin
Student number: 10594418
Statement of Originality
This document is written by Student Jurre Kuin who declares to take full responsibility for the contents of this document.
I declare that the text and the work presented in this document are original and that no sources other than those mentioned in the text and its references have been used in creating it.
The Faculty of Economics and Business is responsible solely for the supervision of completion of the work, not for the contents.
1. Introduction ... 5
2. Literature Review... 8
2.1 Marketing Communications... 8
2.2 Startup vs. Incumbent ... 9
2.3 Marketing approaches: Traditional vs. Social Media Marketing... 12
2.4 Factors leading to a successful brand... 17
2.4.1 Creating Awareness through Social Media Marketing ... 18
2.4.2 Consumer Engagement ... 19
2.4.3 Creating Consumer Engagement: Word-of-Mouth Marketing, Guerilla Marketing & Relationship Marketing ... 20
2.4.4 Brand Trust ... 23
2.4.5 Brand Loyalty ... 24
3. Hypotheses & Conceptual Model Development... 25
3.1 Consumer Engagement created through Social Media Marketing ... 26
3.2 The relationship between Consumer Engagement and Brand Loyalty ... 29
3.3 Consumer Engagement and eWOM in relation to Brand Trust ... 30
3.4 The mediating role of Brand Trust and Brand Authenticity ... 33
4. Methodology ... 35
4.1 The sample and data collection ... 35
4.2 Survey design ... 36
4.3 Measurements ... 37
5. Results & Analysis ... 39
5.1 Descriptive analysis ... 39
5.2 Hypotheses testing ... 42
6. Discussion ... 45
6.1 Theoretical implications... 45
6.2 Managerial implications... 48
6.3 Limitations and directions for future research ... 48
7. Conclusion ... 50
8. References ... 51
Appendix A ... 61
Abstract:
Purpose
This research has the purpose to explore the concept of social media marketing in the entrepreneurial context, specifically how using social media marketing could benefit startup companies in their daily operations. Especially when incumbents are bounded to a more ‘traditional’ marketing approach, many-to-many social media marketing communications could provide tools for startups to become disruptive in an industry through the creation of brand loyalty and brand trust.
Method
The study has an empirical design and uses an online distributed questionnaire to test the developed hypotheses. The data of 224 persons was collected and measured on a 7-point Likert scale using 27 questions. All questions were linked to the different constructs of the developed conceptual model testing for a simple mediation between consumer engagement and brand loyalty, with brand trust as a mediator.
Findings
Social media marketing practices impact consumer engagement mostly through the cognitive and emotional component of consumer engagement. Continuously, consumer engagement has a positive effect on brand loyalty and brand trust. A mediating effect of brand trust on brand loyalty wasn’t found by this study.
Implications
This study shows that managers of startup companies should focus on creating brand loyalty through many-to-many social media marketing practices. By doing so, startups might become disruptive and able to outperform incumbents. The study is limited by the reliability of its measurements, indicating a problem with the internal consistency of the research.
‘‘Marketing is a race without a finishing line’’
-Philip Kotler
1. Introduction
In an article published by Forbes.com in January 2018 called ‘‘Dozens of Brands Have Built
Business on Facebook and Instagram, But It’s Getting a Lot Harder’’, Feldman indicated how
social media marketing (SMM) becomes harder for companies as the social networking platforms turn into a more hostile advertising environment. As these large social networking sites (SNS) grew larger in their sheer number of daily users and created the possibility for marketers to target potential consumers more effectively through their databases, many companies are adopting these SMM tools in their marketing practices leading to increasing advertising costs and fiercer competition. It therefore becomes harder and harder for small and medium-sized companies to compete with the bigger players in the market, since they’re generally bounded to a lower marketing budget than their larger competitors.
The study addresses how this is especially the case for startup companies that use social media in order to rapidly grow in size, but now see the low-cost advantage of their SMM practices crumble as incumbent companies replace these new marketing strategies for their more traditional marketing approaches. Two main issues come forward in the Forbes.com article: The SMM costs are increasing due to the increase in SMM advertising costs and secondly, larger companies are rapidly expanding their use of social networking sites in their advertising practices. These issues are however not entirely in line with the current academic literature on social media marketing that goes beyond the use of ‘just’ traditional advertising in marketing via SNS. Authors like Laroche, Habibi, Richard & Sankaranarayanan (2012), Balakrishnan, Dahnil & Yi (2014), Wang & Kim, 2017 and Neti (2011) highlight the importance of targeting social communities, establishing word-of-mouth (WOM) and creating
consumer engagement. Marketing strategies that focus more on many-to-many communications could still benefit startup companies, especially when their incumbent competitors are bounded to a one-to-many more traditional marketing approach.
Over the last decades the marketing paradigm is shifting once more from a product-centric approach towards a consumer-product-centric approach (marketing 1.0 to marketing 2.0). In the work of Gronroos (1994) this is seen as the shift from the marketing mix paradigm towards the consumer-centric paradigm. The consumer-centric approach calls for more cooperation, co-creation, openness and consumer commitment (Constantinides, 2014), which provides the foundation for the marketing 3.0 paradigm.
The paradigm seems to have shifted once more, in line with Philip Kotler’s’ quote we are now witnessing the upswing of marketing 3.0, focusing on the consumer as being a whole human being with hearts, minds and spirits and not as just a ‘plain’ consumer (Kotler, Kartajava & Setjawan, 2010). Now that their world is globalizing and getting more confusing, consumers are searching for companies that take their interests and needs at heart in both their missionary and visionary statements. The rise of expressive social media fits this new conception, because it provided consumers with a digital voice to fulfill their needs resulting in consumers getting more selective in their choice of being loyal to a company.
SMM disrupts the field of marketing and changes the way companies are handling their customer experience and marketing practices, moreover it provides opportunities for marketing strategists learning to operate in an environment with consumers on top of their corporate priorities (Constantinides, 2014). Marketing through social media channels gives advantages in the fact that social media is free of bias and generally cost-free, it is no surprise that these marketing communications become more and more involved in the daily operations of both large ‘traditional’ companies and smaller emerging companies.
The need for more academic background becomes clear when studying the literature on social media marketing, especially in the new venture context. Academics do agree on the importance of SMM and the value of adopting a SMM strategy for brands, however current research fails to address questions regarding the disruptive nature and implications for brands operating in highly competitive industries and how some brands benefit more from adopting SMM than others. It becomes clear that there is a necessity for research aiming at these matters and the planned research will address this gap by examining how social media marketing could benefit small startup companies competing with incumbents in the same industry. Particularly, when the established companies are implementing a more traditional marketing strategy based on one-to-many communications, social media marketing’s many-to-many implications could help startups in outperforming their competitors in terms of creating consumer brand loyalty.
The purpose of this research is therefore to describe this effect in relation to the current knowledge in the field of branding. Social media practices are seen as a trigger for potential consumers to engage with a brand, prior to becoming loyal towards the brand. Brand trust is assumed to have a mediating role to the direct relationship between consumer engagement and brand loyalty, arguing that the consumer engagement created by many-to-many SMM practices increases one’s loyalty towards a startup company even more. In the comparison between startups and incumbents this study addresses these interrelated effects from a startups point of view, working with the following research question:
Could consumer engagement, achieved through social media marketing, help startups in outperforming incumbents through the creation of brand trust and brand loyalty?
The study has the following structure: First the theory section differentiates between startups and incumbents and explores the concept of social media marketing in relation to traditional marketing, next the branding literature is examined to explain how a SMM strategy leads to a successful brand and the underlying relationships between the different antecedents are summarized in the conceptual model and hypotheses development and finally, in the empirical section the results of the survey are reported and analyzed. The results are discussed and concluded in the final section of the paper and the final section contains also the limitations and implications of this study.
2. Literature Review
2.1 Marketing Communications
Organizations generally differ in terms of their marketing communication strategies. In every organization the marketing department will plan out their way of reaching the potential customers depending on the size of their available marketing budget.
Marketing communications could be defined as being the means by which companies attempt to persuade, inform, remind and incite their consumers in a direct or indirect way (Keller, 2016). Marketing communications could roughly be divided into the primary categories owned, earned and paid media posed by Edelman & Salzberg (2010). In which owned media are the channels that an organization controls, paid media is the brand’s payment to leverage a channel and earned media exist only when consumers become the channel. Before engaging in social media marketing, companies should visualize their marketing ecosystem in terms of paid, owned and earned media and then determine the types of marketing communications that suits the ecosystem best (Hanna et al., 2011). Marketing communication instruments are hardly ever used in isolation, and companies are establishing often some sort of overlap between one-to-many and many-to-many communications (Pickton & Broderick,
2005). In relation to the primary media categories, one-to-many communications are the paid and owned media channels, whereas earned media channels are characterized by many-to-many communications.
Marketing communications could be seen as being the means by which firms attempt to give information, persuade and remind consumers either directly or indirectly (Keller, 2009). Marketing communications are the ‘voice’ of a company and have an important role in establishing dialogue and build consumer relationships. However, with so many different marketing communication options currently available and the possibility to combine traditional and new methods, choosing the right marketing communication strategy has become a struggle to many marketers (Keller, 2016). Key is to understand how the traditional and new communication models are related to the building blocks of the consumer brand-based equity pyramid (CBBE). The next section defines the characteristics of the different types of companies and how these relate to traditional- and social media marketing.
2.2 Startup vs. Incumbent
The extant research on social media, especially in the social media marketing context, mainly focuses on the implementation of these practices by large companies or incumbents and on the other hand consumers, rather than small companies like entrepreneurial companies and startups (Aral et al., 2013; Ghezzi et al., 2016). With current research on startup marketing being sparse, this research aims at providing answers into how small startup companies could benefit from adopting a non-traditional marketing strategy.
Startup companies are defined by Sutton (2000) as being companies that are new, young and inexperienced with immaturities across the organization. Typically for startup companies are the limited available human and financial resources (Kraus, Harms & Vinks, 2009), the focus is generally at getting the product out as soon as possible and then form strategically.
Despite the weak market position and the few resources, some startups manage to still be successful (Katila, Chen & Piezunka, 2012).
Startups are likely to be small companies, but this is by no means an interchangeable terminology. Not every small company can be called a startup company and vice versa isn’t every startup a small company. The startup company characteristics often differ from small companies in fewer internal communication and coordination problems (Sutton, 2000). Small companies are also different in the likelihood to already be established in a particular industry and are often implementing a less disruptive business model than startups (Christensen, Raynor & McDonald, 2016), although problems they face in terms of competitiveness to larger players in the market are similar to those that startups face. In these small companies the owner is often the focal person in decision making and firm activities (Kraus, Harms & Vinks, 2009) for startups this is not always the case.
Various stakeholders have a strong influence on this type of companies in its early stages. The inconsistency of investors, consumers, partners and competitors are all effecting the company and shape the company in what it does and doesn’t and how (Sutton, 2000). The liability of being small combined with the liability of being new, as both described by Kraus et al. (2009), both have negative consequences for the small firm marketing, as a result: Poor marketing is the main cause of at least one-third of startup failures (Hæreid & Indregård, 2015) and firms bounded to strong competitive challenges have a reduced likelihood of marketing communication effectiveness and other branding benefits (Keller, 2009). On the other hand, startup companies are capable of unleashing the disruptive power of social media due to their flexibility and creativity (Ghezzi, Gastaldi, Lettieri, Martini & Corso, 2016) and learn to develop a marketing competence when social competitor pressure is high (Braojos-Gomez, Benitez-Amado & Llorens-Montes, 2015).
A formal definition of startup companies still is up to debate, but this research will consolidate the previous mentioned characteristics and defines startups as being often small to medium-sized companies in the earliest stages of growth with a particularly innovative business model. Some of the characteristics described of these typical, commercial startups could of course also apply for larger established players in the field. Incumbents generally are not youthful and are often not bounded to the same challenges as startups are. However, some of these challenges, like technological and economical changes in an industry, are affecting incumbents as well. Startup companies with disruptive business models and radical innovations in this regard are able to outperform incumbents due to their creativity and flexibility, catapulting them to market leadership (Chandy & Tellis, 2000). On the other hand, incumbents could develop strategic business units (SBU’s) as a way to extent their brand and compete with a startup brand in terms of flexibility and adaptability or even buy the startup and invest to compete with future disruptors (Zhang, Kolte, Kettinger & Yoo, 2018). A good marketing strategy could help startups in maintaining their disruptive efforts.
New venture success is driven by marketing practices linked with ‘‘entrepreneurial behavior’’. To most owner-managers social media is mostly reactive and subjected to resistance and for many SMEs, while they’re present on social media, they still don’t benefit optimally from these channels (Nakara, Benmoussa & Jaouen, 2012). While the present research focuses at the advantages SMM has for (small) startup companies, understanding these channels becomes more and more important to other types of entrepreneurial firms as well. Especially now that they too become more involved in competition with established players in the market due to their online presence. When incumbents are bounded to a more traditional marketing approach, social media marketing might provide benefits for entrepreneurs. Table 1. provides an overview of the differences in firm type. The next
paragraph will aim at distinguishing traditional marketing and social media marketing in terms of effectiveness and their relationship to the firm’s characteristics.
Firm Characteristics
Entrepreneurial Startup Incumbent
Small firms, focal person
New, young and unexperienced Established, experienced and older Limited human/financial resources Limited human/financial
resources Rich in resources
Less internal communication and coordination problems than startups
Early (growth) stages of lifetime
Maturity/ decline stage of lifetime
Disruptive business model
Technological and economical challenges
Flexible and creative
marketing Traditional marketing Table 1. Firm characteristics
2.3 Marketing approaches: Traditional vs. Social Media Marketing
The effects of traditional marketing practices in relation to sales have been covered extensively by academic marketing literature over time. However, now that the paradigm is shifting, and tradition marketing communications like TV, radio, magazines, newspapers and other forms of advertising are losing effectiveness (Keller, 2009), marketers start rethinking their traditional marketing communication practices (Kaplan, Thaler & Koval, 2003) and adopting incrementally to the new environment.
Nail (as cited in Trusov, Bucklin & Pauwels, 2009) mentions signs of traditional marketing approaches losing effectiveness in comparison to upcoming new marketing approaches. In his study he finds a large drop in consumer attitudes toward traditional advertising, which indicates that fewer people were learning about new products and fewer
people were buying products after viewing an advertisement. Jayawarna, Jones, Lam & Phua (2014) contribute to this view with their results indicating that traditional marketing practices, like selective distribution, market segmentation and advertising, have little effect on overall firm performance. A reason could be that due to new consumer attitudes, traditional media practices like advertising are raising advertising avoidance (Kelly, Kerr & Drennan, 2010).
Scholars like Hanna, Rohm & Crittenden (2011) on the other hand, point out that traditional metrics like reach and awareness still are important contributors to firm success, and that the focus should be at integrating both traditional and non-traditional marketing practices into one marketing strategy. Translating into using traditional metrics like advertising on SNS in order to establish consumer engagement (Chu & Kim, 2011) and to use analytical programs to track ad performance.
With regard to paid, owned earned marketing communications, the effect of traditional earned media is found to have a larger effect on company sales in comparison to social earned media, but this is dependent on the frequency of activity (Stephen & Galak, 2012). When authors accumulated for per-event sales impact they found that social earned media has a role in driving traditional earned media activity and moreover has a larger sales elasticity.
These findings highlight the paradigm shift in marketing all once more, with scholars agreeing on many sheer traditional media marketing practices as being outdated and digital technology and the internet as being the new media forces leading to the decline of traditional media marketing (Keller, 2009). Social media moves customers away from just plain awareness creation by one-to-many advertising, but brings customer engagement, brand loyalty, consideration and advocacy more to the forefront.
Startups are adopting straightforward and creative online marketing strategies to build their brands and develop their online presence, because of the increasing necessity of building a clear brand vision and create innovative activities (Bresciani & Eppler, 2010), what follows
is that conventional activities like ‘traditional’ mass advertising are becoming less necessary. Startup companies and smaller companies generally rely more on creating consumer engagement and relationships to build their brand image and reputation and less on advertising, compared to large multinational firms (Chen, Ji & Men, 2017; Bresciani & Eppler, 2010). Social media marketing allows firms to tap into a much larger community that wasn’t be able to target via traditional channels (Stavrakantonakis, Gagiu, Kasper, Toma & Thalhammer, 2012), which provides new tools for startups to compete with incumbents that are bounded to a more traditional marketing approach.
Incumbents are likely to engage in defensive actions when new rivals gain market share in an industry, increased advertising, promotions and cost cutting are some of the (traditional) actions incumbents could undertake (Karakaya & Yannopoulos, 2011). This is often a result from when an incumbent doesn’t respond vigorously to startup companies entering overlooked segments, most likely because these large firms are chasing after higher levels of profitability (Christensen et al., 2016). The startup entrants are then able to move upmarket and to deliver the value necessary to reach the incumbent’s original customers, combined with the advantages of their disruptive business model and innovative marketing efforts.
Compared to traditional marketing social media marketing is a relatively new type of online marketing that achieves marketing communication and social branding objectives by implementing marketing communication tools in various social media networks (Kaur, 2016). Authors like Mangold & Faulds (2009) argue that SMM is part of the promotional mix within the firm’s marketing mix, the need to integrate these social media activities in the firm’s marketing communication strategies is therefore stressed by the authors.
The concept of social media itself could probably best be described by the definition posed by Kaplan & Heanlein (2010, p.61) who define social media as being a ‘‘group of internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of the
Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user generated content’’. These internet-based applications us the ‘‘crowds wisdom’’ to connect information from the crowd in a collaborative way in different forms ranging from Internet forums, pictures, Wiki’s, video’s, blogs, vlogs and many more (Neti, 2011, p.2), The social media tool could help companies in fostering an environment in which parties can communicate, influence each other, gather knowledge and information and create purchasing power and post purchase services (Mangold & Faulds, 2009).
On social networking sites individuals and organizations are able to connect and interact to one another in the form of online communities. Social media marketing uses these social networking sites to promote their products and services, as SNS allow companies to interact and build relationships with consumers in the form of online brand communities. Keller (2009) highlights the importance of marketing communications for companies in the creation of online and offline virtual brand communities. Marketing communications link brands to people, locations, events, experiences, feelings and things. Which make them contribute to brand equity and establish a brand into stakeholders’ memory, creating brand image. The positive effects brand communities on social have on community markers like rituals, traditions and obligations to society are found by Laroche et al. (2012). These markers furthermore positively influence value creation practices like social networking and community engagement which all impact brand loyalty, brand trust is found to have a mediating role in converting these practices. The reverse is true as well, Keller (2001) describes how resonating brand loyalty ensures a sense of community.
For simplicity, this research will mainly focus on three of the largest social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Facebook currently has around 2.167 billion active users as being the largest worldwide social network, Twitter is estimated to have at least 336 million active users and Instagram with 800 million active users coming in 7th in terms of
largest ranked social networks (Statista, 2018). As Facebook provides better tools to monitor and track advertising and marketing efforts, Facebook will be acting as a focal point throughout this study.
Social media marketing refers to all techniques that target social network applications to spread brand awareness or promote particular products. With regard to the marketing communication types posed by Keller (2009), social media marketing fosters online advertising on SNS, online sales promotions, offers events and experiences, maintain public relations, enables direct marketing by segmenting consumers, establishes interactive marketing focused on engaging customers or prospects, is highly involved with electronic word-of-mouth marketing that creates communications between people using company’s products or services and finally: it enables personal selling by which a company directly interacts with its consumers (Keller, 2009).
Traditionally, creating brand knowledge by marketing practices used to be an expensive exercise with a low success rate and holding a high level of risk for the companies involved (Kohli, Suri & Kapoor, 2015). Compared to most of these traditional media marketing practices SMM efforts don’t require elaborate marketing budgets and a large share of potential customers are often only utilizing new media types instead of former ‘traditional’ media types like TV, newspapers, magazines and radio (Hanna et al., 2011). Social media provides a cost-effective tool that enables startup companies to establish their own corporate identity and a way of engaging with company’s stakeholders (Chen et al., 2017). Which is why more and more startups are adopting social media marketing as it provides them with the possibility to reach branding objectives, to attract customers and to receive business benefits with a wide reach without the necessity of a large budget (Michaelidou et al., 2011). The same goes for a firm’s branding efforts which used to be involved with large upscale investments and a tightly managed image via controlled communications, with the goal to creating a dominant brand as
a way to cultivate brand loyalty (Kohli, Suri & Kapoor, 2015). Social media disrupts this branding paradigm as consumers’ behavior and brand preferences can be altered more easily, heavy investments in the goal of building a megabrand are becoming more and more difficult to justify to stakeholders (Kohli et al., 2015)
The positive effect of social media adoption on firm performance was described by Ngai et al. (2015), the impact of social media marketing activities is fostering a brand’s customer base and is a good tool to get consumers to be involved with your brand. However, many-to-many SMM has less impact on direct brand sales (Xie & Lee, 2015; Monchon, Johnson, Schwarttz & Ariely, 2017). Monchon et al. (2017) suggest that firms should first focus on achieving a high level of earned and owned media and use paid media (targeted advertising) for selling to the client.
2.4 Factors leading to a successful brand
Factors effected by marketing communications are discovered and elaborately described in this part of the literature review. More specifically, the present research focuses on how social media marketing has an influence on these different branding elements. Factors are retrieved from the branding literature and are argued to differently impact marketing practices across companies, their effect is arguably different among different sized companies in sense that consumers might react more positive to startup company brand qualities compared to incumbents. Exploring the effects of these brand qualities on consumers, could help in explaining why startup brands are benefiting more from a social media marketing strategy. The theory described is closely related to the Customer-based brand equity model (CBBE) posed by Keller (2009), in which customers react differently to a brand dependently on the stage of brand development and branding objectives. Startups could possibly develop a more effective
SMM strategy by creating brand resonance and brand trust, which makes them eventually outperform incumbents.
2.4.1 Creating Awareness through Social Media Marketing
Companies active on SNS are able to create brand awareness by targeting online communities. Creating brand awareness still remains an important branding objective and implementing social media advertising into a social media marketing strategy could help in creating initial brand awareness existing from recall and recognition (Keller, 2009; Grace & O’Cass, 2002). Brand awareness is particularly important for brands in creating distinctiveness, which makes it easier for consumers to find the brand (Romaniuk, Sharp, Paech and Driesener, 2004). The communication between a brand and a consumer becomes also more effective due to identification and the risk reduces in the overall message strategy.
Keller (2016) describes brand awareness as being the first stage of his well-known CBBE pyramid model. When brand awareness is combined with brand associations, a higher loyalty could consequently be created among customers making a company becomes less vulnerable to competitive marketing efforts. Its marketing communications would also become more efficient and effective. Keller (2016) proposes that brand awareness could be increased by targeting multiple touchpoints, both online and offline. In turn this would eventually add to the degree of how easy a consumer recalls or recognizes a particular brand or it creates occasions for the consumer when the brand comes to mind (depth and breadth of brand awareness).
Startups are found to use social media as a tool to build awareness and this is arguably one of the utmost important uses of social media for startups (Chen et al., 2017). Since startups generally don’t have the brand image nor the reputation, brand awareness is key to survive in the competitive environment (Bresciani & Eppler, 2010). In the results of Kadam & Ayarekar
(2014) is pointed out that social media is most effective for entrepreneurial firms to create brand awareness and have a significant impact on entrepreneurial performance, a reason for this is that brand awareness spreads more virally through social media than through traditional media (Kohli et al., 2015). Startups could therefore benefit from targeting online communities by social media marketing practices that are cost-efficient and fit the firm’s characteristics in terms of flexibility and creativity. To measure the performance, one should aim at the branding objectives leading to a successful brand.
2.4.2 Consumer Engagement
The brand engagement pyramid, as posed by Keller (2016), builds on the CBBE pyramid (Keller, 2009) in that it’s switching the focus towards the creation of consumer brand engagement instead of brand equity. Keller suggests that the higher steps in the brand development process lead to a higher consumer engagement, meaning that a company’s performance evolves over multiple stages of engagement. In the top of the pyramid this would mean that a consumer becomes more active in its engagement due to brand loyalty, this active engagement means that consumers are willing to invest time and personal resources in a brand beyond those that would be expected at the (re)purchase of a brand (Keller, 2001).
Customer engagement encourages consumers to participate in shaping a brand or brand experience. Getting consumers and potential consumer to engage online with a brand is crucial to successful SMM (Evans, 2010). Akar & Topcu (2011) find in their research that the consumers in large numbers frequently use social networking sites and that it affects their attitudes towards social media marketing. This means that when marketers use promotion strategies they have to keep in mind that social media users do not necessarily consider marketing activities on SNS as being positive. Furthermore, should marketers realize that social
media gives users the advantage of investigating and testing the company quality or prices claims (Constantinides, 2014).
Wang & Kim (2017) find that social media marketing could improve customer relationship capabilities and firm performance and that the social CRM capability is important if companies combine marketing strategies and social media to improve customer engagement and firm performance. The effect of attracting customers comes forward in their research stating that firms highly involved with social media marketing probably have more interactive characteristics than firms taking a traditional marketing approach. This adds to the work of Hanna et al. (2011) in that these engagement capabilities help marketers into reaching the potential customers that would otherwise be passive bystanders. In the new marketing paradigm, these passive bystanders could possibly be reactivated and contribute to brand engagement through electronic WOM (Chu & Kim, 2011). Scholars like Ling et al. (2004, as cited in Chu & Kim, 2011) suggest that brands should be up-to-data in their social presence to ensure consumer engagement, which they could do by offering content that is fresh and frequent through their social channels. Ashley & Tuten (2014) confirm the importance of updates or incentives and add to these findings with several creative strategies focusing on establishing consumer engagement. These strategies center around message strategies, sales promotions and user generated content, message strategies like experiential, image and exclusivity were associated most with creating consumer engagement.
2.4.3 Creating Consumer Engagement: Word-of-Mouth Marketing, Guerilla
Marketing & Relationship Marketing
Marketing in the new venture context naturally relies heavily on word-of-mouth, mostly because of the zero to none additional costs and its effectivity. In the work by Chen et al. (2017) interviewees mention the WOM goals of their startups in order to create content and getting shared on social media. A link between brand loyalty, purchase intention and eWOM is found
by Balakrishnan et al. (2014), whereas Trusov and others (2009) find that eWOM referrals on acquisition of new customers is very strong compared to traditional marketing approaches. The increase in eWOM impacts new sign-ups for at least three weeks, which differs positively from traditional marketing impacting customer acquisition for 3 to 7 days. The carryover effect is found is that new customers attract new customers through their eWOM. This effect is also described by Batra et al (2012) in their work on brand love, in which they point out that loyal customers are likely to express their love for a brand with WOM and attracts new consumers in this process. SM plays a disruptive role in this process as these new consumers buy brand because they are assured of the brand’s quality as vouched by others (Kohli et al, 2015).
As a part of, or as an extension of, social media marketing, the concepts viral marketing, guerilla marketing and buzz marketing are gaining popularity among scholars. These concepts have in common that they are all effective marketing approaches for startups, because they create a large effect with a fairly small budget.
Guerilla marketing provides a solution of how to successfully gain a consumer’s attention without the expenses for a large marketing campaign and is described as being original, atypical, provoking, dynamic, innovative and creative (Hutter & Hoffman, 2011). Buzz marketing and viral marketing are described as being instruments of guerilla marketing. In buzz marketing a company uses influencers to spread the word and in viral marketing a diffusion effect is triggered in which one customer passes along the message to other potential buyers (Hutter & Hoffmann, 2011; Hæreid, M. B., & Indregård, S. (2015). Viral marketing uses an electronic network (SNS) to reach as many potential buyers as possible using a triggering message that is getting widely spread due to its content (Dobele, Toleman & Beverland, 2005). Viral marketing is very dependent on people deeming the content worthy to share amongst others, social media lowers these boundaries making viral marketing an interesting tool for a social media marketing campaign.
Startup firms can also get funded from a larger pool of investors through eWOM, when they use their social media activities to build a positive brand image, attract followers and get positive feedback (Jin, Wu, & Hitt, 2017). Newly attracted consumers could be managed more easily by establishing consumer-brand relationships in relationship marketing through social media. Using social media marketers could uncover common themes in consumer feedback, but also persuade people to engage with their online content (Ashley & Tuten, 2015). Furthermore, social media monitoring could help firms in getting more insight in their customers and measure the effects of WOM and social media marketing. Tools for social media marketing are getting more and more accessible for different sized companies, they have in common that these tools could be used for reputation management, crisis management, competitor analysis, market research, customer relationship management, influencer detection and product/innovation management (Stavrakantonakis, Gagiu, Kasper, Toma & Thalhammer, 2012). These different antecedents of social media marketing show that there are more tools to SMM than merely advertising on SNS to establish consumer engagement. These tools could be used by startups in their competition because of their low-costs nature and their possibility to upscale.
Social Media Marketing Practices Non-Traditional,
many-to-many
Traditional, one-to-many
Guerilla Marketing SM Advertising
➢ Buzz Marketing ➢ Banners
➢ Viral Marketing ➢ Commercials
WOM Marketing ➢ Sponsored feed
Relationship Marketing
➢ Video
advertising
2.4.4 Brand Trust
In a large sample of 28.000 internet participants Nielsen (2012) found that 46% of respondents reported trusting online advertisements, on the other hand 92% said to trust WOM from friends and family over traditional advertising and 70% has more trust in online reviews.
Brand trust could be considered as being one of the most important brand qualities and Delgado-Ballester & Aleman (2001) describe brand trust as being the security and reliability consumers could perceive in brand interactions combined with the believe that the brand takes the consumers best interest at heart and has specific traits or features that are consistent, competent and credible (Doney & Cannon, 1997). Brand trust is known to contribute to earning brand consideration (Liberali, Urban & Hauser, 2013), increases brand loyalty for customers since it is one of the main antecedents (Chaudhuri & Holbrook, 2001; Delgado-Ballester & Aleman, 2001), increases purchase intention and loyalty (Chaudhuri & Holbrook, 2001; Doney & Cannon, 1997) and has a role in brand love (Batra et al., 2012).
Brand trust has the potential to create a highly valued relationship between a company and the consumers (Chaudhuri & Holbrook, 2002) and could best be defined as being the customers’ ‘‘willingness to rely on the brands ability to perform a function’’ (Chaudhuri & Holbrook, 2001; Morgan & Hunt, 1994) The importance of cultivating trust and harvesting value by companies was furthermore explored by Porter & Donthu (2008). In their work, they find proof that trust motivates customers into behaving rationally towards a firm and that the importance of member embeddedness benefits a firm more in terms of customer beliefs than signaling quality content. On the other hand, consumer distrust has the consequence that consumers are less likely to pay attention to the content or to the advertising (Kelly et al., 2010). Fundamental dimensions of brand trust are pointed out by Li, Zhou, Kashyap & Yang (2007) as being competence and benevolence. Competence in brand trust means the ability to
intention of a brand and its responsiveness towards consumers making all brand elements trustworthy and congruent. These factors both relate to the authenticity of a brand (Eggers et al., 2013) The general consensus among scholars is that brand trust is established by combining one’s feelings of familiarity, security and privacy. WOM, advertising and one’s brand image are also contributing to the level of trust someone has in a brand (Chow & Holden, 1997; Delgado-Ballester & Munuera-Aleman, 2001), but these studies have not explored how trust is built online.
Social media marketing makes brand more transparent, because of the possibility for consumers to find information on a brand and to compare brands between each other (Kohli et al, 2015). The huge marketing expenses of companies aren’t necessarily an assurance of quality anymore due to the increased transparency, which makes the risk of having questionable quality in the eyes of a consumer more bearable for small unknown companies. Trust in smaller unknown companies therefore grows and the quality is ensured by online eWOM (Kohli et al, 2015).
2.4.5 Brand Loyalty
The last stage in the customer-based brand equity model pyramid created by Keller (2009) is the establishment of brand resonance; or resonating brand loyalty. Brand loyalty could therefore be seen as an end goal, loyal customers stay at a particular brand and are likely to repurchase the brand’s products instead of buying from a competitor. True brand loyalty exists of mainly an attachment and an activity component, which translates to having a high cognitive and emotional involvement with the brand, and some sort of active behavior to express this involvement (Day, 1969). The strength of brand loyalty becomes clear in the work of Batra et al. (2012). In their work they find that loyal consumers in their own mind would be likely to buy again from a brand and would say positive things about the particular brand (WOM). Even
when these consumers were confronted with something bad about the brand, they would question it and look for an alternative explanation.
Social media, blogs, online communities and SNS are a good way of cultivating brand loyalty (Keller, 2016), which is posed as being one of the key communication objectives just as building trust. Laroche and others (2012) already found a positive relationship between brand communities on SNS and brand loyalty with a mediating role for brand trust. A startup company that is able to create brand loyalty among customers as an outcome of social media marketing is likely to outperform other companies in the field. The previous sections of the literature overview provide the answers in how a company is able to do so. In the next part the relationships between the different antecedents are described, and hypotheses are developed and processed into a conceptual framework
3. Hypotheses & Conceptual Model Development
With the sparse literature on startup social media marketing in consideration, this study has the aim to contribute to expand existing knowledge on this subject. Social media marketing has the potential to unleash disruptiveness in startup companies competing with larger incumbents (Kohli et al., 2015; Ghezzi et al., 2016). The consumer brand equity pyramid model posed by Keller (2009; 2016) provides answers into how brands are able to establish brand loyalty which consequently evolves into an increase in consumer engagement. Startup companies could potentially benefit from integrating social media marketing communication practices to develop close connections to their consumers resulting into an increase in brand loyalty. When incumbents are bounded to a more traditional intumescence in their marketing approach (Ghezzi et al., 2016), a startup company possibly benefits from a marketing strategy focusing on creating consumer engagement.
The conceptual model posed in figure 1. represents the research question in a conceptual framework. The model shows a direct effect of consumer engagement, acquired through social media marketing, on brand loyalty. Whereas a mediating effect of brand trust on brand loyalty is proposed to explore the role brand trust has on brand loyalty in social media marketing. The goal of this study is to explain how startups are able to create brand loyalty from social media marketing, and how this effect is stronger for startup brands compared to established firms creating a competitive advantage.
Figure 1. Conceptual Model
3.1 Consumer Engagement created through Social Media Marketing
Consumer engagement is all about interacting and communicating with the brand. Before people engage with a brand they are likely to follow a sequence of steps as described by Batra & Keller (2016): they feel a need or want that needs to be fulfilled, recall the brands operating in that product category, then they evaluate a small number of chosen brand with respect to their quality-performance level and trustworthiness, they develop a preference for a particular brand and at last they take an action step to purchase. Loyalty and further engagement possibly ensues after the purchase, as are word-of-mouth brand advocacy actions and other customer
engagement behaviors resulting from motivational drivers like C2C interactions and blogging activity (Brodie et al., 2011).
The wide variety of online available communication options empowers companies to offer tailored brand information and to send all sorts of messages reflecting personal interests and behavior. Engagement could be seen as a multidimensional concept with cognitive, emotional and behavioral predominant dimensions (Brodie et al., 2011). The emotional component involves one’s affective system by generating feelings and emotions making the relationship between consumer and a brand’s products/services become affective. The cognitive component is linked to conscious mental processes, engaging consumers into using their creativity and problem-solving skills. The practical or behavioral component is connected to the practical act of doing something (Gentile, Spiller & Noci, 2007). The predominant dimensions are all present in brands bounded to high levels of customer commitment and customer involvement, these brands are characterized by having a profound relationship with their consumers building a community (Gentile, Spiller & Noci, 2007).
H1a: Social media marketing positively influences consumer engagement.
Social media practices are likely to have a positive effect on consumer engagement, giving firms that are competing with a superior marketing strategy a natural prevalence. Gezzi et al. (2016) describe how innovative social management startups are able to develop solutions for managing all of their company contacts relationships effectively and efficiently. Startups are specializing in social media sentiment analyses to gather deeper knowledge on how consumers perceive their products or services. Other startups specialize in social media data collection and use their insights to form smart audiences or increase consumer engagement through enabling consumers to create user content related to the company’s products/services through their
social network profiles. This would also contribute to WOM dynamics (Ghezzi et al., 2016; Chen, Ji & Men, 2017). As Leiras (2017) points out in her research on how new apps could outperform mainstream (established firm) apps, companies’ new social apps are able to engage users when focusing on factors like: focused attention, positive affect, endurability and novelty. The factors are related to the cognitive and emotional dimensions of engagement.
To be able to compete with incumbents, startups have to take into account that a particular point of engagement needs to be reached with as many people as possible indicating the importance of the behavioral component of consumer engagement for startup companies. Another way startups are actively trying to engage with consumers is through the concept of ‘gamification’ (Robson, Plangger, Kietzmann, McCarthy & Pitt, 2016). Gamification uses game mechanics in order to increase loyalty and engagement but also to create a ‘fun’ environment. The concept centers around creating gamified experiences for consumers to try to make them engage with a company through active behavior. The gamified experience evokes emotions like excitement and disappointment by tapping into key motivational drivers of human behavior. Startups incorporating gamification in their business practices are performing exceptionally well and are able to attract and engage large amounts of users (Jiang, 2011).
In their work on creative strategies on social media, Ashley & Tuten (2015) add to this thought in that consumers are participating in social media marketing campaigns actively because of both: the desire to be entertainment and the wish to receive information. Entertainment is argued to be a better motivator for engagement with top brands compared to informativeness, hinting that startup companies could improve their social media marketing practices by focusing their approach on the behavioral dimension of consumer engagement.
Incumbents, on the other hand, rely more on their corporate reputation in social media engagement. Corporate reputation is said to consist of at least two components: an emotional and a cognitive component (Fombrun et al., 2000), which represents the companies past
behavior and outcomes that depict the ability to deliver valuable results to firm’s stakeholders. Organizations are improving perceptions of corporate reputation by establishing social media engagement (Dijkmans et al., 2015). The positive association between the social media engagement and the company’s reputation is a result of the emotional contagion fostered by social networking with others. As companies are increasing their intensity of social media usages higher levels of engagement are established, which lead to improved company perceptions by both consumers and non-consumers (Dijkmans et al., 2015)
H1b: Startups are able to create higher levels of consumer engagement through SMM than
incumbents by focusing on creating behavioral engagement, for incumbents the cognitive and
emotional component of consumer engagement are more potent.
3.2 The relationship between Consumer Engagement and Brand Loyalty
Keller (2009, 2016) links consumer engagement to brand loyalty in his leading CBBE model. Active engagement is seen as an aspect of brand loyalty, meaning that consumers are ready and willing to invest personally in the brand next to the investment of actually buying the brand’s products or services. The connection between consumer engagement and brand loyalty is relatively close in that both thrive on a close emotional connection between the consumer and the brand. The cognitive, emotional and behavioral characteristics of brand engagement are outlined by Hollebeek (2011, p.790) who integrates these aspects into his definition of consumer engagement: ‘‘the level of an individual customer’s motivational, brand-related and context-dependent state of mind characterized by specific levels of cognitive, emotional and behavioral activity in brand interactions’’. Brand loyalty differs mostly in sense that loyalty signifies repeated purchases, which are also an act of behavioral engagement, over a period of
time. Hollebeek, as well as Bowden (2009), highlights and finds a potential positive relationship between brand engagement and loyalty.
Kuruzovich (2017) finds a positive relationship between startup engagement practices in terms of eWOM marketing and consumer engagement. The consumer engagement they find continues to influence venture financial, potentially indicating that startup brand engagement leads to an increase in loyalty and startup success. To gain competitive advantage over established rivals startup companies could adopt technologies for analyzing customer behavior. Ansari & Riasi (2016) find that startups using new technologies for consumer engagement were able to create higher levels of consumer loyalty. In their work they highlight the importance of relationship marketing, which is described as the establishing, maintaining and enhancing relationships with consumers or even terminating these. Relationship marketing is therefore fundamentally linked to consumer brand loyalty and startups could use these ‘engaging’ relationships to grow and become more competitive in the marketplace.
H2: Consumer engagement positively influences brand loyalty for startups.
3.3 Consumer Engagement and eWOM in relation to Brand Trust
Social media marketing makes brands more transparent and gives brands the opportunities to position themselves as being sincere in their brand personality (Maehle et al., 2011). Trust is positively linked to eWOM (Yeh & Choi, 2015), trust in virtual communities significantly influences the way communication flows in groups and how information is shared among members. People are more likely to disseminate information they perceive as being trustworthy compared to information from less credible sources. Product or brand related information communicated through personal contacts in SNS is said to be perceived as being more trustworthy (Chu & Kim, 2011).
Other forms of active engagement with a brand on SNS, such as: ‘liking’ messages, sharing content or commenting on posts, driven by consumer’s motivations to return a positive brand experience are all potential forms of eWOM communications (Kim, Sung & Kang, 2014). As many authors agree on the consensus that brand trust can be established through familiarity, security, privacy, WOM, advertising and brand image (Delgado-Ballester & Munuera-Aleman, 2001; Chow & Holden, 1997; Ha, 2004), the role of online consumer engagement on brand trust could probably best be described by the effect of brand authenticity in brand trust. Eggers, O’Dwyer, Kraus, Vallaster & Guldenberg (2013) find a significant effect between brand authenticity constructs: brand consistency and brand congruency in relation to brand trust. These constructs are shared by Olieveira et al. (2017), who explore the dimensions of trust in terms of competence (brand consistency), benevolence (brand self-congruency) and integrity. As Beverland (2005) points out the importance of opening up brands to communities in order to establish brand authenticity, it would be interesting to see how this community’s engagement influences brand authenticity and therefore brand trust. As social media are an effective tool for consumers to obtain independent information on brands and since it’s easier to share opinions on this information, brand authenticity is said to be a potential new pillar in the creation of brand trust and credibility (Schallehn, Burhmann & Riley, 2014; Beverland, 2005).
H3a: Consumer engagement acquired through social media marketing leads to a higher level
of overall brand trust.
In the entrepreneurial context social media marketing is linked to higher initial levels of brand trust and engagement by Kadam & Ayarekar (2014). The increase in brand transparency through social media make large marketing budgets no longer a quality assurance (Kohli et al.,
2015). Relatively unknown brands are using social media to sign quality to consumers through eWOM, driving trust in smaller ventures. Social media marketing provides new ways of creating brand trust for startups as long as they establish consumer engagement, this is possibly a source of startup disruptiveness as a third of online consumers trust an unknown brand over an incumbent (Olenski, 2013). Smaller ventures, using SNS practices, don’t necessarily need elaborate budgets to build a brand and could often achieve organizational personality by authentic brand-building and consumer-oriented practices. An interesting understudied concept influencing this relationship is the concept of brand authenticity.
Brand authenticity translates into brand trust as long as brands are able to stay committed to defining brand values and therefore establish brand congruency and brand consistency (Eggers, O’Dwyer, Kraus, Vallaster & Guldenberg, 2013). Perceived brand authenticity positively effects brand loyalty, since the influence of brand authenticity on both emotional brand attachment and WOM was found by Morhard et al. (2015), and furthermore enables consumers to perceive a greater congruence between themselves and a brand. The concept of brand authenticity is not yet thoroughly examined by academic literature, while successful applications in the marketplace are numerous. Brand authenticity could therefore be a potential source of disruptiveness if startups are able to establish an authentic image (Schallehn, Burhmann & Riley, 2014).
H3b: Consumer engagement obtained from a startup’s social media marketing lead to higher
3.4 The mediating role of Brand Trust and Brand Authenticity
Many authors already linked brand trust to brand loyalty highlighting the importance of trustworthiness for brands in their consumer relationships as trust in brand management is argued to be one of the key ingredients into creating brand loyalty (Chauduri & Holbrook, 2001; Delgado-Ballester & Munuera Aleman, 2001). Chauduri & Holbrook (2001) measured the effect of brand trust on brand commitment finding an empirical relationship between trust, commitment and brand affect. Delgado-Ballester & Munuera-Aleman (2001) suggest the role of brand trust as a variable in brand commitment as well and state that this is especially the case in situations of high brand involvement. Lau & Lee (1999) already revealed a positive relationship between brand trust and brand loyalty, finding that brand characteristics like brand reputation, brand predictability and brand competence are influencing this effect. In the social media context Laroche et al. (2012) find a full mediating effect of brand trust on brand loyalty whereas brand trust is influenced by social media practices and community engagement.
Establishing brand loyalty among consumers leads to marketing advantages like reduced costs and more new customers and trade leverage (Chauduri & Holbrook, 2002). As are positive WOM outcomes, greater resistance to strategies by competitors and consumers are less likely to shift to other brands when receiving bad news about a particular brand (Batra et al., 2012).
H4: Brand Trust has a mediating role in the relationship between Consumer Engagement and
4. Methodology
4.1 The sample and data collection
Before the main survey activities were executed a prior test-survey was send to 5 respondents to test the accessibility and difficulty of the survey questions. Questions that turned out obscure, too vague or hard to understand were revised and in some cases deleted. To make the survey more readable and accessible on mobile phones, the pictures and text of the survey’s design were enlarged and highlighted. The main survey was distributed across social networking sites and applications to make sure participants were likely to be bounded to some form of social media advertising, due to their social media activity. The survey was designed solely for Dutch participants to test how the different marketing practices impact Dutch consumers. The population of active Facebook users in The Netherlands is currently around 10,5 million (Statista, 2018), the survey was send to over 500 people using different social networks and personal contacts. To try to entice people to fill in the 5-10 minutes form, the possibility to win a Tony’s Chocolonely chocolate bar when completing the survey was added to the invitation. After two weeks of data collection the chocolate bars were allocated to 5 participants using an online randomizer.
A number of 419 people started on the survey, but only 224 filled in the entire questionnaire resulting in a completion rate of 53%. Participants were 35% male and 65% female ranging from 17 to 62 years old and 2/3 of the ages were under 26 years old. Participants were divided into three groups consisting of 30 heavy social media users, who use social media more than 20 times, 100 medium users ranging from 6 to 20 times a day and finally 94 users that barely use social media on a daily basis ranging from 0 to 5 times a day.
4.2 Survey design
The survey has four different parts in which every part shows a comparison between a startup company and its social media practices and an incumbent company operating in the same industry, bounded to a more traditional marketing approach. The goal is to see if participants react similarly to the different model constructs as they answer the questions. The first question measures the effect of the social media practice on the participant, followed by questions regarding the degree of engagement, brand trust, and brand loyalty. The first part of the survey shows a small Dutch startup that uses a Guerilla (viral) marketing approach in their SMM. The aim is to see if participants are triggered by seeing the viral message (with many likes, shares etc.) and if their reaction corresponds to the model constructs. On the other hand, participants are confronted with an incumbent that uses a ‘traditional’ ad to persuade people into buying a similar product.
The second part shows a startup and incumbent that are active in the consumer technology industry. The startup uses eWOM marketing to attract new users and the incumbent uses a traditional one-to-many approach by showing video advertisements and ads on websites. The third part shows a startup operating more in the service category, that uses relationship marketing to connect closely to its customers. The incumbent uses similar techniques but is mostly known for its traditional marketing in forms of TV advertisements, flyers and online ads. The survey is included in the appendix.
The last part asks participants for personal data related to: gender, age and SM usage. In the end participants could fill in their email to have a chance to win a chocolate bar reward. A number of 138 persons did so, from which 5 winners were drawn.
4.3 Measurements
The constructs were measured by using a seven point-Likert type scale, that ranged from 1= zeer mee oneens to 7= zeer mee eens; or in English, 1 = strongly disagree to 7 = strongly agree. The survey design shows participants comparisons between startup companies and larger established companies in different product and service industries. Startups used in the survey range from very small to large companies, incumbents range from brand extension competing to directly competing. When including startup companies in the survey design, the author chose companies that are likely to not be too familiar to participants or even unknown. This was done to make the monitoring of the marketing effectiveness more reliable, since it rules out the possibility that consumers have more brand information or associations than the survey provides.
The incumbents are, on the other hand, better known by the survey participants making it interesting to explore the role of brand authenticity in brand trust. The survey design showed participants both company types and their marketing practices. The aim was to see if participants were more positive in their answers to startup companies practicing social media marketing compared to the traditional practices of incumbents. Social Marketing many-to-many practices were included in the survey. Relationship marketing, WOM marketing and Guerilla (viral/buzz) marketing are the types of social media marketing explored by this study because they characterize the low-cost, high impact possibility of SMM which is naturally more attractive to startup companies. In contrast, the established companies were characterized by a more traditional one-to-many style of firm-communication, in this case mostly consisting of social media and traditional media advertising. Appendix A shows an example of the survey design as it was distributed.
Brand trust was measured using 9 different items including items related to one’s trust
Han et al. (2015), these items were adjusted to fit the present survey better. Brand authenticity was measured using the scale items from Schallehn et al. (2014) and Eggers et al. (2013) regarding brand consistency and brand congruence. As Brodie et al. (2011) appoint three components to consumer engagement, respectively a cognitive, behavioral and emotional antecedent, these constructs where tested by using items from Hollebeek et al. (2014) in terms of: cognitive processing, affection and activation factors, the items were adjusted and, in some cases, omitted to fit the current research. Brand loyalty and Social Media Marketing were accessed by using the items develop by Ismail (2017) in his research to study the effects of SMM on consumer loyalty. In this case the scale items needed some revision too before they could be added to the survey. Consumer engagement operates as an independent variable and brand loyalty as a dependent variable. Brand trust is mediating this effect and consumer engagement is a dependent variable to the independent variable social media marketing. The
Social Media Marketing variable was measured using items SMM1, SMM2, SMM3 and SMM4, Consumer Engagement using items CP1, CP2 and CP3 for cognitive processing, AF1, AF2 and AF3 for affective engagement AC1, AC2 and AC3 for active engagement. Brant trust was measured using BT1, BT2 and BT3, for brand authenticity in brand trust brand consistency was measured by using the items: BCS1, BCS2 and BCS3 for brand congruency BCG1, BCG2 and BCG3 were used. Finally, for measuring brand loyalty the items BL1, BL2, BL3 and BL4 were used. The appendix contains a table showing the different questions and the corresponding literature.
