Building brand loyalty and endorsement with brand pages: integration of the lens of affordance and customer-dominant logic

Purpose Numerous companies have launched brand pages (BPs) on social networking sites to enhance customer-brand communication, cultivate the customer-brand relationship and promote brand loyalty. This study aims to investigate how BP affordances support social commerce. Design/methodology/approach The study devises a theoretical model linking the proposed BP affordances (visibility, selectivity, persistence and interactivity) to three customer values (relationship quality, brand experience and smart shopping feeling [SSF]) to encourage brand loyalty and BP endorsement on the part of the customer. Findings Data collected from 591 respondents support all proposed hypotheses. The model explains high variances in brand loyalty and BP endorsement, indicating that relationship quality plays a more salient role in producing brand loyalty, while SSF plays a more important role in eliciting BP endorsement. Originality/value The study is unique in four ways. First, drawing on the lens of affordance, it proposes specific affordances for BPs and offers empirical results for their applicability. Second, by incorporating CDL into the research model, it illuminates the high explanatory power of these proposed BP affordances on the three customer values. Integrating the S-O-R model with the affordance perspective and CDL provides a more complete picture of the BP phenomenon. Third, it extends the reach of existing work by examining BP endorsement in social media as a dependent variable beyond brand loyalty, with SSF included as another source of values to shed more light on the relationships depicted in the model. Fourth, by taking trait competitiveness into account, it sheds further light on relationships between customer values and BP endorsement.

Automated summary

This study investigates how brand page affordances support social commerce by exploring the impact of relationship quality and smart shopping feeling on brand loyalty and BP endorsement. The unique research approach and four distinctive aspects of the study contribute to its theoretical and practical value.