From Information Experience to Consumer Engagement

Introduction

Social media has made significant changes in the way people interact with and shop for products, becoming an integral part of everyday life. In response, fashion brands have made tremendous efforts to distinguish themselves on social media in order to increase customer engagement. As a result, many brands are witnessing the success of their social media presence. Operating a profile page on social media (aka, a brand page) allows brands to enjoy various benefits with no cost, such as posting advertisements and product-related information, providing real-time communication and customer service, and offering personalized and shoppable content. Unsurprisingly, engagement with social media continues to grow from the standpoint of both brands and consumers. For example, as of 2019, 98% of fashion brands managed brand pages on Instagram, and 95% of online consumers aged between 18 and 34 and 80% of Instagram users followed a brand page on social media. In such a competitive and constantly changing environment, it has become crucial for brands to develop better brand page strategies not only to attract new customers but also to increase current customer engagement.

Consumer engagement, defined as a consumer's psychological state and participation beyond transactional activities during their iterative and co-creative interaction with an object (such as a brand, product, or brand page), is a prerequisite for the success of platforms and brands and therefore has become the key objective that social marketers desire to achieve. Accordingly, consumer engagement for the success of brands' digital platforms, such as social media, has attracted increasing attention from researchers in two primary foci. First, researchers have demonstrated that consumer engagement with a brand page can be multitudinous, encompassing passive interactions (such as consuming the information on the brand page) as well as active interactions (for example providing feedback, posting content, and referring brand posts to their friends). Second, many studies have identified the drivers predicting consumer engagement, including perceived benefits of using the platform, content characteristics, marketing efforts, community features, social media experiences, and individual consumer characteristics. However, how the multi-dimensions of information experiences work as drivers for consumer engagement remains unexplored. That is, there is little research into the process of users' information experiences influencing consumer intentions to engage with the brand page. Moreover, the perspective of value-in-the-experience argues that an individual value is the process of an individual's sense-making process, which is subjective and constitutes experiences within the context of the user's lifeworld. Applying this notion to the brand page context, Carlson et al. accentuated the role of value in the brand page experience in driving consumer engagement. This experiential perspective provides an alternative view of consumer behavior in a service environment that has shifted the focus from the components provided by the service provider to the experiences that consumers personally have in the environment. Although there have been many studies conducted in the brand page context, most have applied value/benefit frameworks focusing on the users' assessment of characteristics of brand posts (such as quality, time, type, and source of posts) and/or brand pages (such as social presence and marketing efforts). Research investigating what consumers derive from information experiences on brand pages and whether this translates into consumer engagement intentions toward the brand page is needed. Therefore, we aim to fill this void in the literature by developing and testing a model of information experiences on brand pages that contributes to the knowledge of consumers' information experiences and subsequent engagement intentions toward brand pages on social media.

To this end, this study focuses on consumer experiences of information on fashion brand pages, namely information experiences. An information experience is defined as what occurs in the interaction between an individual and the informational lifeworld they encounter. Given the widespread use of social media in individuals' lives, social media have created new and dynamic information environments where people actively seek, acquire, create, and share information, extending individuals' information experiences in their lives. Thus, understanding how information experiences on brand pages foster strong engagement will help brands develop more engaging and meaningful pages. As different environments involve different sets of information, understanding the nature and the process of one's information experience specific to a brand page is important. Researchers in this field assert that, going beyond documentary evidence, information encompasses all information-related actions, thoughts, feelings, and life experiences. Thus, one's information experience is subjective and situated and affects one's meaning-making process, which facilitates engagement in the informational environments. Similarly, brand pages are particularly interactive platforms in which multiple information sources, such as texts, images, videos, hashtags, and links, are supported. In this dynamic environment, consumers' interactions with information are likely to vary as they seek, browse, consume, and share information, thereby forming unique information experiences. Focusing on information experiences with a brand page, this study claims that this new information channel can facilitate unique information experiences for users, which will develop engagement with the focal brand page.

To develop a model of information experiences on brand pages, this study builds on the cognitive appraisal theory of emotions, the control–value theory of achievement emotions and van der Sluis' framework of information eXperience (IX). In brief, the proposed model posits that one's information experience consists of perceived values of information interactions, emotions elicited, and experiential states and in turn influences engagement intentions toward brand pages. We further assert that curiosity is another key factor relevant to learning and arousing positive emotions in information experiences. As people differ in the extent to which they experience information, personal differences such as curiosity can differentiate the nature of the information interaction process. In a brand page setting where consumers interact with available information, one's degree of curiosity plays a moderating role in the effects of the perceived values related to the information interactions on positive emotions. Therefore, this study aims to propose and empirically validate a model of information experiences on brand pages. Specifically, we tested whether values involved in information interactions prompted positive emotions, which in turn would foster experiential states contributing to customer engagement intentions. We also investigated the moderating role of curiosity in the relationship between perceived values and positive emotions.