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Fierce competition among over-the-top (OTT) platforms has rendered branding a precondition for consumer appeal. This study proposes a new structural equation model for OTT brands, especially Netflix, where hedonic and eudaimonic entertainment motives function as facilitators of consumer brand engagement.

An online survey was conducted. Structural Equation Modeling was used to build the model and test for various direct, mediation, and moderation effects.

The results suggest a multiple mediation model in which the relationship between the two types of entertainment and intention to use Netflix is sequentially mediated by consumer attention and consumer brand engagement. Moreover, this study confirms that female consumers, compared to male consumers, exhibit higher levels of consumer brand engagement when motivated by hedonic entertainment.

This is the first study to present a novel structural model for the content consumption of OTT brands and test the role of the two types of entertainment in the intention to use Netflix.

This study aims to investigate the critical role of online brand community (OBC) engagement and brand evangelism: the role of age, gender and membership number.

To achieve the study’s objective, 303 active Facebook OBC users were surveyed. The AMOS structural equation modelling (SEM) is used to test the hypothesised model.

The results indicate that OBC engagement improves brand evangelism. Specifically, the results show that age, gender, and OBC membership number moderate the relationship between OBC engagement and brand evangelism. Interestingly, this study found that female, younger and low-OBC follower consumers more significantly contribute to nourishing brand evangelism than male, older and high-OBC follower counterparts.

OBC engagement is validated as a key brand evangelism driver, further substantiating its role as a crucial strategic metric. Moreover, age, gender and OBC membership number as moderating factors in the association between OBC engagement and brand evangelism (word of mouth referral, brand defence and future purchases) have been verified. Although the findings suggest that improved OBC engagement contributes to evangelism, this effect transpires more significantly among female, younger and low-OBC followers than male, older and high-OBC followers.

This paper aims to use the cognitive appraisal theory to investigate the effects of brand engagement and materialism on the positive emotions of joy and excitement evoked by a product at different stages of the purchase process.

Two complementary studies were conducted to achieve the research objectives. Study 1 used a longitudinal design, examining the pre-purchase stage and a moment shortly after the purchase. Study 2 adopted a cross-sectional approach, focusing on the post-purchase stage. Relationships among variables were analyzed through hierarchical regression and moderation analyses.

The findings indicate that materialism is not significantly associated with consumers’ positive product-evoked emotions (joy and excitement) before and shortly after purchase. At these two stages, brand engagement predicts positive emotions. In the post-purchase stage, where materialism is weakly related to joy and excitement, a robust positive link exists between brand engagement and positive product-evoked emotions. Moreover, higher levels of materialism reduce the experience of joy and excitement among participants with high levels of brand engagement.

Experiencing joy and excitement is crucial in consumer behavior. However, little is known about the determinants of these emotions in the consumption context, especially concerning internal consumption-related factors and different stages of the purchase process. This paper contributes to the field by shedding light on the role of brand engagement and materialism in the experience of positive product-evoked emotions. The findings provide evidence that brand engagement significantly enhances consumers’ positive product-evoked emotions, highlighting its importance in consumer behavior research.

This paper aims to bridge the gap by understanding the context of ageing consumer behaviour in the online community. Specifically, this research seeks to identify which content typologies are critical to generating high engagement levels and, consequently, online brand advocacy and to understand the underlying motivation behind consumer online engagement.

A netnographic approach was used to comprehensively analyse older consumers’ online communities on Facebook, namely, “Silversurfers”. A total of 3,991 posts were included in the study and analysed using a content analysis approach over two years, from 2020 to 2022.

Results revealed that photography is the most active media type among older consumers. This study extends the literature on content marketing, identifying 17 new content types that reflect the four motivation states of older consumers to engage with the online community: cognitive/informative oriented, affective/emotional oriented, co-creation/interactive oriented and nostalgic oriented. Moreover, this investigation stressed affective/emotional oriented and nostalgic oriented as the primary motivations for higher engagement levels.

The older population is growing, which makes the ageing market potentially huge. However, more literature needs to address it, especially in online communities. Finally, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study develops an original content typology framework in which firms can consider implementing effective content typology strategies for the older consumer segment.

Drawing on the self-congruity theory and customer engagement literature, this research accounts for the influence of the three dimensions of customer self-congruity on customer engagement with global brands by uncovering the mediating mechanism of brand psychological ownership and moderating mechanism of global connectedness. The research framework is tested across developed and developing country contexts to highlight any cultural differences in the drivers of customer engagement with global brands.

Data were collected from developed (USA; n = 270) and developing (India; n = 273) countries through two online surveys and tested, employing structural equation modeling, across the two markets to investigate cross-cultural variations.

Social self-congruity has the strongest influence on customer engagement for USA consumers, while all three forms of self-congruity are equally important in India. Psychological ownership consistently works as the mediating mechanism across both contexts. While global connectedness accentuates the relationship between self-congruity and brand psychological ownership for Indian consumers, it attenuates the relationship amongst USA consumers.

While prior literature mainly establishes a direct link between self-congruity and customer engagement, this study provides a deeper understanding of the self-congruity–customer engagement relationship by: a) investigating the mediating role of psychological ownership; b) examining the moderating role of global connectedness and c) studying all three forms of self-congruity (i.e. actual, ideal and social) simultaneously. The study, testing the framework in developing and developed country settings, highlights cultural nuances in forming customer engagement with global brands.

This study explores whether and how four main factors of short-branded video content (content matching, information relevance, storytelling and emotionality) facilitate consumer engagement (likes, comments and shares), as well as the moderating effect of the release time (morning, afternoon and evening) in such relationships.

This study uses Python to write programs to crawl relevant data information, such as consumer engagement and short video release time. It combines coding methods to empirically analyze the impact of short-branded video content characteristics on consumer engagement. A total of 10,240 Weibo short videos (total duration: 238.645 h) from 122 well-known brands are utilized as research objects.

Empirical results show that the content characteristics of short videos significantly affected consumer engagement. Furthermore, the release time of videos significantly moderated the relationship between the emotionality of short videos and consumer engagement. Content released in the morning enhanced the positive impact of warmth, excitement and joy on consumer engagement, compared to that released in the afternoon.

The findings provide new insights for the dissemination of products and brand culture through short videos. The authors suggest that enterprises that use brand videos consider content matching, information relevance, storytelling and emotionality in their design.

From a broader perspective, this study constructs a new method for comprehensively evaluating short-branded video content, based on four dimensions (content matching, information relevance, storytelling and emotionality) and explores the value of these dimensions for creating social media marketing success, such as via consumer engagement.

This study aims to explore how brands use brand personification techniques in real-time marketing on social media, particularly Twitter, and examine how these techniques impact consumer engagement, moderated by brand-event congruence levels.

Data included 464 tweets posted by 95 brands around three large events in 2019. The types of brand personification techniques and the level of brand-event congruence applied by the tweets were content-analyzed, and regression analyses were conducted to examine their linkages to consumer engagement metrics.

Results confirmed the use of diverse personification techniques in brands’ real-time marketing tweets as in the previous literature. The study also revealed a new personification technique, tacit expression, not reported in previous literature. The study also showed that the overall effectiveness of multimedia-based (vs caption-based) personification techniques in increasing consumer engagement on social media was greater, but their relative effectiveness varied depending on whether or not the event was functionally congruent with the brand.

The findings offer valuable suggestions to brand managers regarding prioritizing brand personification techniques and aligning brands’ social media marketing with real-time events to maximize the effectiveness of real-time marketing in boosting consumer engagement.

This research offers insights into the dynamic effects of different brand personification techniques in the new context of real-time marketing, extending the scope of literature on brand personification and anthropomorphism. The revelation of a new type of brand personification not captured in the extant literature is also a significant contribution.

This study aims to investigate the influence of brand relationship quality and consumer community identification on consumer engagement. This study also examines the mediating role of consumer engagement between brand relationship quality and consumer community identification with brand love. Positive word of mouth is taken as an outcome variable.

To test the proposed relationships, data were collected from 580 social media-based brand community followers and analysed through structural equation modelling.

Results corroborate brand relationship quality and consumer community identification as critical drivers of consumer engagement on the online platforms. The results further reveal a positive association between consumer engagement and brand love which consequently foster positive word of mouth. The findings also corroborate the partial as well as full mediating role of consumer engagement on different proposed associations.

This study offers an in-depth insight of specific motivations to engage consumers in the virtual domain, make them adore their brands and spread a positive word. All of these outcomes are crucial in offering competitive advantages to firms. This study validates the relevance of consumer engagement interactions in contemporary firms’ relationship marketing strategies.

This paper aims to examine how the relationship norms established between customers and brands influence customer perceptions of crowdsourcing (vs firm-generated) cues.

Four studies (N = 851) examine the moderating role of relationship norms on product labeling cues (crowdsourcing vs firm-generated) effects on brand engagement, and the underlying mechanism of self-brand connection.

The findings suggest that crowdsourcing (vs firm-generated) cues lead to higher brand engagement (Studies 1A–1B), mediated by self-brand connection (Studies 2–3). In addition, relationship norms moderate the effects (Study 3), such that under exchange brand relationships crowdsourcing (vs firm-generated) cues yield higher brand engagement, whereas communal brand relationships reverse such effects.

The findings provide valuable managerial implications by highlighting the importance of using relationship norms as diagnostic cues to successfully implement crowdsourcing initiatives.

This research adds to the customer-brand relationship literature by revealing an accessibility-diagnosticity perspective of consumers’ reactions to crowdsourcing (vs firm-generated) cues.

This paper aims to explore the impact of brand authenticity dimensions (i.e. aesthetic, symbolism, heritage, originality, quality commitment and virtue) on consumer engagement in the context of social media. This study answers to the need of scholars to understand consumer behaviour towards family and non-family firms’ brand authenticity constructs and for practitioners to find the correct levers to increase consumer engagement.

Top 10 European family firms with a retrievable Facebook (FB) page from the Global Family Business Index have been selected. Then, the study analysed family firms’ social media consumer engagement versus their non-family business direct competitors on a sample of 21.664 FB posts over a four-year period, leveraging multi-group analysis.

The results outline that three out of six brand authenticity dimensions posted on FB are statistically arousing more interactions respect to non-authenticity-related contents when posted by family firms. However, there are no statistically significant findings when brand authenticity content is posted by the non-family competitors.

This research is helpful for practitioners and entrepreneurs who might want to strengthen their social media brand strategies. With this regard, the study provides insights on which elements of brand authenticity are perceived by consumers as more engaging and which levers to use when communicating the familiness of the company.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is one of the earliest studies crosscutting the family business and brand authenticity literature streams to conduct an empirical analysis based on official FB data with a data set of over 20,000 observations. Moreover, this study assesses that not every dimension of the brand authenticity construct is relevant in the context of social media and that its effectiveness depends on the firms’ familiness.