The Impact of Motives for Brand Page Engagement on Retailer Brand Page Engagement With Special Reference to Luxury Fashion Brands

Abstract

Social media is becoming a popular platform, enhancing customer engagement towards brands, product and organisations. Hence, it is important that marketers understand the motives behind online brand engagement, particularly in an industry such as luxury fashion where branding plays a significant role in buying decision of consumers. In the contemporary fashion maker, brands seem to attempt to maintain an active online presence through different means. The use of retailers' online presence is one such mean that enables a brand to engage with customers. Although previous studies mainly focused on customer brand engagement in off-line' contexts, only a limited study can be found on the same phenomenon in 'online' contexts, especially with retailers' brand engagement. Thus, this study intends to examine the impact of motives for brand page engagement on retailer-brand page engagement: with special reference to Luxury Fashion Brands. The data were gathered using a self-administered questionnaire. The sample consisted of 180 respondents who are in the positions of manager and/or above and prefer luxury fashion brands. The respondents were reached through their Linkedin profiles adopting judgemental sampling technique. Findings revealed that there is an association between motives for brand page engagement and consumers' social media brand page engagement with retailers' brands. Among them, only investigation motive, entertainment motive and brand affiliation motive were found to have significant impact on social media brand engagement for retailers' brands. These findings show the need of understanding the customer motives towards a retailer brand page in order to manage the brand page engagement.