Social Media and Customer-Based Brand Equity: An Empirical Investigation in Retail Industry

Anatoli Colicev, Ashwin Malshe and Koen Pauwels
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Anatoli Colicev: Department of Marketing, Bocconi University, 20100 Milano, Italy
Ashwin Malshe: Department of Marketing, The University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX 78249, USA
Koen Pauwels: School of Business, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115, USA

Administrative Sciences, 2018, vol. 8, issue 3, 1-16

Abstract: As customer-brand engagement progressively shifts to digital domains, understanding social media effects in branding has become a vital issue. Social media effectiveness is especially important for the US retail sector due to intense competition among retailers for consumer attention and engagement on digital channels. Yet, the research on the effectiveness of social media in the retail industry remains sparse. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how social media affects US retailers’ customer-based brand equity (CBBE) which is an important indicator of brand success. Using a dataset of 15,717 retailer-day observations, the authors empirically test the dynamics between owned and earned social media and CBBE using panel vector autoregression (PVAR). The authors find strong impacts of owned and earned social media on CBBE across the board. However, they find that owned social media harms CBBE of retailers dealing in hedonic and high involvement products. Whereas owned social media helps general retailers in building CBBE, it reduces CBBE of specialty retailers.

Keywords: customer-based brand equity; owned social media; earned social media; high/low involvement; utilitarian/hedonic goods; retail industry (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L M M0 M1 M10 M11 M12 M14 M15 M16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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