Companies are increasingly allocating more of their marketing spending to social media
programs. Yet there is little research about how social media use is associated with
consumer-brand relationships. We conducted three studies to explore how individual and
national differences influence the relationship between social media use and customer
brand relationships. The first study surveyed customers in France, the U.K. and U.S. and
compared those who engage with their favorite brands via social media with those who do
not. The findings indicated that social media use was positively related with brand
relationship quality and the effect was more pronounced with high anthropomorphism
perceptions (the extent to which consumers‟ associate human characteristics with brands).
Two subsequent experiments further validated these findings and confirmed that cultural
differences, specifically uncertainty avoidance, moderated these results. We obtained
robust and convergent results from survey and experimental data using both student and
adult consumer samples and testing across three product categories (athletic shoes,
notebook computers, and automobiles). The results offer cross-national support for the
proposition that engaging customers via social media is associated with higher consumer-brand relationships and word of mouth communications when consumers
anthropomorphize the brand and they avoid uncertainty.
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