Success Factors of Brand Communication on Facebook: A Structured Abstract

Strong consumer–brand relationships are highly valuable assets for both interaction partners: While consumers benefit from satisfying their social needs by creating and maintaining bonds with a desired brand, the brand benefits from increased customer loyalty and advocacy (Algesheimer et al. 2005). With the advent of social media, marketers are confronted with new opportunities to foster meaningful relationships with their customers and to disseminate information for creating strong brands with a rich and clear brand knowledge structure in the consumer’s mind (Gensler et al. 2013). Facebook brand fan pages (BFP) are deemed as one of the most powerful instruments to strengthen consumer–brand relationships and to enhance interaction as well as dialogue with and among a brand’s consumers. A BFP is here defined as company-initiated online community representing a brand’s official channel on Facebook to communicate with its former, current and potential customers. By “liking” such a page, people become part of a consumer community of similar-minded individuals and which enables them to publicly share their brand experiences with others. In such an environment, marketers have lost their pivotal role as authors of their brands’ meaning (Kuksov et al. 2013): Consumer-generated content has a considerable impact on the audience’s opinions, feelings, and behaviors (e.g., Hennig-Thurau et al. 2010) that potentially undermine corporate brand communication. Hence, for companies BFP are a double-edged sword. This raises the question arises whether marketers’ considerable efforts to create corporate brand postings ultimately convert into strong consumer–brand relationships or, more precisely, consumer-based brand equity (CBBE), or not.