Consumer engagement in online brand communities: A netnographic study on Gymshark's Facebook brand page

Abstract

Consumer engagement on online brand communities has increasingly become a field of interest among marketers. As the process of online consumer engagement is different from traditional ones, it continued to impose challenges to the marketers to take different strategies. For the online consumer engagement, it has become necessary for marketers to build a two-way communication with consumers in order to analyze their responses and produce resourceful insights. In online brand communities, consumers’ responses can be measured through content. The content can be generated by different content creators and it has different characteristics that are connected to consumer engagement. Using consumer engagement as a theoretical framework, the current study scrutinizes consumer engagement with the content, considering content characteristics and type of content that are created by three types of content creators such as firm, influencers and consumers. The study identifies that firm generated content are able to create higher consumer engagement in comparison with influencer or consumer generated content. It also analyses consumer engagement that tends to increase when the content integrate humors, emotional appeals or they are in the form of polling or contests. The analysis discovers caption as an element of content characteristics which sheds new light on this research field. This research provides new insights to practitioners and marketers how they can design social media content, which context of the content they should include and which content creator’s post they should share in order to maximize online consumer engagement with their brands.