BUS631: Brand Management

In today's highly connected network environment, the common use of social media is changing the environment for branding. The interactive, participatory, and open natures of social media offer brands the opportunity to connect and create online content, more and more brands are noticing the importance of social media when it comes to areas such as exploring consumer needs and building online reputation, and are therefore striving to provide engaging branded content as well as adopting an responsive approach to consumers to gain a competitive advantage, which can be shown through digital customer engagement. Eigenraam et al. suggests that digital customer engagement are consumers' online behavioral manifestations of brand engagement that go beyond purchases. Consumer social media practices such as browsing, liking, sharing, commenting can be conceptualized as behavioral manifestations of customer brand engagement. Digital customer engagement is growing in importance as a source of brand value, as it increases consumer loyalty and affects brand performance. Recent research has shown that digital customer engagement is a key performance metric for evaluating a brand's social media strategy and has therefore attracted much attention in various research areas. However, many enterprises find it a difficult task to successfully deploy social media strategies to develop customer engagement, trust and relationship. Therefore, enhanced insights into the effectiveness of brand social media strategies for digital customer engagement contribute to our understanding of this critical area. Furthermore, different brand images and type of discretionary purchases may influence digital customer engagement, as brand images are not only associated with media images, but also cover various types of content related to the business, which can influence consumers' brand perceptions or associations. Accordingly, the distinction between discretionary purchases can indirectly affect consumers' brand-related cognitive, emotional and behavioral activity. However, academic understanding in this area is still relatively scarce, thus creating an important knowledge gap.

In this study, we mainly solve the following questions: (1) Which type of brand social media content strategies are more likely to influence digital customer engagement? (2) Do all brand social media response strategies affect digital customer engagement? (3) How do different brand images and types of discretionary purchases affect digital customer engagement? Answers to these questions will help to understand brand social media strategies, including which strategies are likely to have the greatest impact on digital customer engagement, and which brand sources and components they should pay particular attention to when predicting the impact on digital customer engagement. To answer the above key research questions, this study explores the impact of brand social media strategies on digital customer engagement in the following ways: (1) Based on customer engagement theory, this study conducts a comprehensive study of digital customer engagement from hierarchical differences and overall level. (2) Based on the firm-generated content theory and social presence theory, we focus on investigating the impact of two key brand social media strategies on digital customer engagement, which are content strategy and response strategy, and determine which brand social media strategy is more effective by comparing the level of digital customer engagement. (3) From a comparative perspective, the level of digital customer engagement varies significantly by brand image and discretionary purchases. Therefore, this study focuses on the moderating effect of brand image and discretionary purchases.