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The aim of this study is first, to investigate the relative effect of user-generated content (UGC) and firm-generated content (FGC) on online brand advocacy, and second, to examine the mediation effect of customer engagement and the moderation effect of brand familiarity in the relationship between UGC and FGC and online brand advocacy. The differential impact of UGC and FGC on consumer behavior has yet to receive sufficient academic attention among hospitality scholars.

Based on social learning theory, cognitive consistency theory and schema theory, this study established an integrated research framework to explain the relationship between the constructs of the study. This study adopts a scenario-based experimental design in two separate studies within contexts to examine the proposed hypotheses.

The results revealed that UGC is a stronger predictor of online brand advocacy than FGC. A mediation analysis supported that the effect of digital content marketing types on online brand advocacy occurs because of customer engagement. Further, when the brand was familiar, participants showed a higher level of online brand advocacy than when they were exposed to FGC (vs. unfamiliar brand), whereas the effect of familiar and unfamiliar brands on online brand advocacy remains slightly close to each other when the participants were exposed to UGC. Brand familiarity positively enhanced participants’ engagement when they were exposed to UGC. Further, customer engagement is only a significant mediator when the brand is unfamiliar.

This paper presents significant managerial implications for hospitality companies about how they can effectively enhance brand advocacy in the online medium.

This research provides a novel contribution by examining the differential impact of UGC and FGC on online brand advocacy as well as uncovering the underlying mechanism of how and under what conditions user- and firm-generated content promotes online brand advocacy in the hospitality context.

This study aims to focus on the information sharing behavior of employees in the context of online brand advocacy based on the cognition–affection–behavior framework.

Online surveys were distributed to 840 employees, and the gathered data was analyzed by using structural equation modeling.

The effects of perceived organizational justice, employee emotions, organizational trust on online brand advocacy and the moderating role of organizational identification were empirically supported in this study. Noteworthy exceptions to these findings included the lack of evidence of the effect of informational justice on emotions, the effect of procedural justice on negative emotion and the effect of negative emotion on online brand advocacy.

This study expands brand activism research by investigating online brand advocacy and the employee context. Moreover, this work also extends online brand advocacy research through the employee points of view.

This paper aims to examine the antecedents of brand passion and brand community commitment, namely, self-congruity and athlete attraction, as well as their effects on online brand advocacy in online brand communities.

The sample comprises members of a Facebook football fan club brand community. An online survey measuring athlete-level factors, team-level factors and online brand advocacy provides data to test the conceptual framework using structural equation modeling with partial least squares (PLS-SEM).

The findings of this paper support the positive spillover effect from athlete subbrand to team brand advocacy, as self-congruity exerted positive effects on brand passion and brand community commitment, while athlete attraction influenced brand community commitment, leading to online brand advocacy.

The findings validate the dimensions of online brand advocacy and advance research on sports brand hierarchy in brand architecture by establishing the transference effect from athlete to the team brand.

To effectively manage their brands online, brand managers need to pay attention to the powerful and multifaceted tool of online brand advocacy. Brand managers can capitalize on their active advocates by working closely with them to co-create uplifting and authentic brand stories that are worthwhile for sharing, especially in times of crisis.

Building on the developmental trajectory of brand love and vicarious brand experience, the findings verify the directionality of the spillover effect and offer insights into the development of brand advocacy across different brand levels.

Despite an increasing interest in online brand advocacy (OBA) and the importance of online brand conversations, OBA’s conceptualization, dimensionality and measurement are unclear, which has created confusion. This paper aims to answer calls from researchers and practitioners for a better understanding and measurement of OBA. The development and validation of a parsimonious and practical OBA scale is outlined in this paper.

A multi-methods, multi-stage approach was followed to develop a parsimonious OBA scale. From an initial pool of 96 items obtained from qualitative research and from items used in prior general brand advocacy scales, a test-retest reliability study is followed. Academic judges were consulted to verify dimensionality, followed by two separate online surveys to further purify the scale and assess criterion-related validity. Programs including SPSS, AMOS and WarpPLS were used.

This research extends the knowledge of OBA by developing and testing a parsimonious and practical 16-item, four-dimensional OBA scale. Unlike previous attempts to measure OBA, this study suggested OBA as a multidimensional construct with four dimensions (i.e. brand defense, brand information sharing, brand positivity and virtual positive expression). Further, this study showed that OBA is conceptually different from consumer–brand engagement and electronic word-of-mouth.

Future research is encouraged to validate the OBA scale in various contexts and locations. Researchers can use the new OBA scale to examine potential brand-related antecedents and consequences of OBA.

This study provides brand and marketing practitioners with a better understanding of brand advocacy occurring online. The OBA scale offers clear markers or trademarks that will be useful in assessing any brand’s health online and to track and better manage online brand communications and performance.

This research provides the first empirical investigation of Wilk et al.’s (2018) exploratory insights into OBA. The resulting parsimonious scale has furthered OBA as a new area for academic enquiry and presented practitioners with a practical way of measuring OBA.

The online brand advocacy behaviors of omnichannel shoppers, who mainly rely on integrated brick-and-mortar stores (recognized as a vital channel for delivering a seamless shopping experience and meeting the dynamic needs of the shoppers), are still understudied. This study aims to investigate how integrated store service quality (ISSQ) may elicit both positive and negative emotions that contribute to a memorable omnichannel shopping experience and have an impact on shoppers' attachment to the store, leading to their exhibition of online brand advocacy behaviors (brand defense, brand positivity, brand knowledge sharing and virtual positive expression).

The study is a cross-sectional, descriptive and quantitative investigation. The research participants were chosen using a purposive sampling technique. Using a validated self-administered questionnaire, data were gathered from 886 Indian omnichannel shoppers who often purchase at the integrated brick-and-mortar store. The proposed conceptual model was tested using Smart PLS software for partial least squares-structural equation modeling.

The results indicate that positive and negative emotions mediate the relationship between ISSQ and memorable omnichannel shopping experiences, subsequently impacting omnichannel shoppers' attachment to the store and leading to online brand advocacy behaviors. The relationship strength perceived by shoppers significantly positively moderated the relationship between store attachment and different online brand advocacy behaviors (brand defense, brand positivity, brand knowledge sharing and virtual positive expression).

The study relied upon single cross-sectional data from the Indian population, where omnichannel retailing is still nascent.

This study addresses the need to investigate the different emotions that arise while evaluating service quality in omnichannel retail purchase journeys leading to memorable shopping experiences. Emphasizing post-purchase behaviors like different online brand advocacy behaviors (brand defense, brand positivity, brand knowledge sharing and virtual positive expression), this study is the first to show that ISSQ might affect four different OBAs through memorable omnichannel shopping experience and the shopper's sense of attachment to the store. The moderating effect of relationship strength perceived by shoppers with the retailer on a few proposed hypotheses was also tested to give managerial recommendations.

Over the past few years online fashion communities have proliferated becoming an increasingly powerful forum for user-generated content, and consequently, the fashion industry has shown great interest in such communities. The purpose of this paper is to review and analyse brand advocacy behaviour within luxury brand accessory forums: to analyse the role these communities play in influencing purchase intention; assessing their contribution to fashion brand love.

The study adopted a netnographic approach to the phenomenon of online luxury accessory communities. The research reports observational data including blog texts and audience comments for four popular forums: The Purse Forum, The Fashion Spot, The Bag Forum (TBF) and Shoe Forum (SF). Although the forums are open to all and are designed to be internationally relevant; the observations were conducted from a base in the UK.

Findings indicate that informants display some unifying characteristics clustered around engagement, involvement, self-concept and self-connection, brand love and hedonic values. Informants however, display some discernible differences as they “rally” to two distinctive totems: first, active luxury brand advocates and second, passive brand advocates. Although subtle, these differences suggest significant possibilities for fashion brand owners.

Further research could include the measurement of brand advocacy to distinguish more clearly between high and low levels of advocacy and the resulting consumer behaviour intentions. One sub-group that would be interesting to explore is that of brand evangelists and their relationship with fashion brands: what are the reasons for treating brands as religious artefacts and can this extreme level of advocacy be developed by marketing? The study focused on observing online posts by self-selected brand advocates. A worthwhile comparison could be made with fashion communities where brand marketers are active participants and how this influences the discourse and actions of brand advocates.

The findings indicate that all forum members are incredibly attached to their brands, but will still consider purchasing several brands as their “evoked set”. Additionally, even when demonstrating involvement, they can operate as passive observers in the online community.

Social media, especially online forums, play an important role in contemporary luxury fashion branding. This study addresses the role these forums play in supporting brand love and the contribution they make to luxury brand advocacy. Membership and influence dynamics are reported; which have resonance to both practitioners and researchers.

Given the importance of the growing segmentation of ageing consumers and their increasing interaction with the Internet, digital marketing scholars are becoming more interested in this market. Prior research needs to pay more attention to this market in many contexts of digital marketing. This study aims to provide insights into ageing consumers’ content usage, content typology choices, and online brand advocacy (OBA).

Semi-structured interviews were applied, and 16 consumers from Southern Europe aged 55+ were included. The interviews were transcribed and examined following the principles of content analysis.

According to the research, older consumers display their usage and concerns regarding online content. They have different decision-making processes depending on whether they are purchasing products or services. Likewise, their choices of content typology vary based on the utilitarian or hedonic product category.

This study contributes to the literature by providing insights into this growing segmentation and proposing an OBA framework for older consumers related to content marketing. Finally, the study suggests that older consumers are passive online and active offline brand advocates.

The purpose of this study is to increase the understanding of the online brand advocacy (OBA) and brand loyalty relationship through a social identity theory lens.

An online survey was used to obtain the needed data and the relationships of interest were examined using a partial least squares structural equation modelling approach.

Brand loyalty and consumer-brand identification were found to be predictors of OBA, while OBA impacted on purchase intent. In addition, a strong reciprocal relationship was found between OBA and brand loyalty, which has not been reported in prior studies.

This study highlighted OBA's complexity. It suggested OBA is not only an outcome of a consumer-brand relationship but also that OBA plays a key role in the development of such relationships. A consumer's identification with a brand fosters brand loyalty and purchase intent through the giving of OBA.

The more consumers vocalise their brand relationships through OBA, the more they strengthen their relationship with brands. The inclusion of OBA management in brand and marketing strategies should enable organisations to foster opportunities for online consumer-brand interactions that strengthen consumer-brand relationships.

First, unlike previous studies that have used makeshift scales to measure OBA, the authors used a recently developed OBA scale. Second, the important reciprocal relationship between OBA and brand loyalty, which has significant implications, has not been reported in prior 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.

This paper aims to offer insights into the ways two computer-aided qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS) applications (QSR NVivo and Leximancer) can be used to analyze big, text-based, online data taken from consumer-to-consumer (C2C) social media communication.

This study used QSR NVivo and Leximancer, to explore 200 discussion threads containing 1,796 posts from forums on an online open community and an online brand community that involved online brand advocacy (OBA). The functionality, in particular, the strengths and weaknesses of both programs are discussed. Examples of the types of analyses each program can undertake and the visual output available are also presented.

This research found that, while both programs had strengths and weaknesses when working with big, text-based, online data, they complemented each other. Each contributed a different visual and evidence-based perspective; providing a more comprehensive and insightful view of the characteristics unique to OBA.

Qualitative market researchers are offered insights into the advantages and disadvantages of using two different software packages for research projects involving big social media data. The “visual-first” analysis, obtained from both programs can help researchers make sense of such data, particularly in exploratory research.

The paper provides practical recommendations for analysts considering which programs to use when exploring big, text-based, online data.

This paper answered a call to action for further research and demonstration of analytical programs of big, online data from social media C2C communication and makes strong suggestions about the need to examine such data in a number of ways.