Exploring a customer engagement spillover effect on social media: the moderating role of customer conscientiousness
ISSN: 1066-2243
Article publication date: 11 April 2023
Issue publication date: 17 July 2023
Abstract
Purpose
Though prior research has addressed customer engagement (CE) with a focal object (e.g. a brand), the dynamics characterizing customers' engagement with different objects and the potential spillover from a customer's engagement with one object to that with another remains tenuous, exposing an important literature-based gap. The authors, therefore, develop a model proposing the existence of a spillover effect from customers' brand engagement to their engagement with brand-related content and suggest customers' personality trait of conscientiousness to moderate this effect.
Design/methodology/approach
An online survey-based experiment using 380 Danish Facebook users was conducted to test the model.
Findings
The results suggest customers' brand engagement as a significant predictor of their engagement with brand-related content, corroborating the proposed spillover effect. A weaker spillover effect is observed for highly (vs less) conscientious customers, substantiating the moderating role of customer conscientiousness. Moreover, customer conscientiousness is found to interact with brand content-related (i.e. commenting/content creation) task type and brand type (i.e. utilitarian/hedonic) (e.g. more conscientious customers are less likely to engage in brand-related content creation vs. commenting tasks), weakening the spillover effect.
Originality/value
This study extends prior research by quantitatively corroborating an intra-individual CE-based spillover effect from customers' brand engagement to their engagement with brand-related content. The authors also unearth a moderating role of customer conscientiousness, which interacts with brand- and brand content-related task type, on the spillover effect, informing the development of digital marketing strategies.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Professor Valdimar Sigurdsson, Ph.D. for his feedback and suggestions offered to the paper, and the Danish supermarket chain Netto for its Facebook “recipes” campaign, which contributed to the authors' idea for developing this paper.
Citation
Hollebeek, L.D., Kulikovskaja, V., Hubert, M. and Grunert, K.G. (2023), "Exploring a customer engagement spillover effect on social media: the moderating role of customer conscientiousness", Internet Research, Vol. 33 No. 4, pp. 1573-1596. https://doi.org/10.1108/INTR-08-2021-0619
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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