Fostering brand engagement and value-laden trusted B2B relationships through digital content marketing The role of brand's helpfulness

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore how digital content marketing (DCM) users can be engaged with business-to-business (B2B) brands and determine how such engagement leads to value-laden trusted brand relationships. Design/methodology/approach Through an online survey, data were collected from the email marketing list of a large B2B brand, and the hypothesised research model was analysed using covariance-based structural equation modelling. Findings This paper identifies a bundle of helpful brand actions - providing relevant topics and ideas; approaching content with a problem solving orientation; as well as investing in efforts to interpret, analyse and explain topics through DCM - to foster relationship value perceptions and brand trust. Critically however, cognitive-emotional brand engagement is shown to be a necessary requirement for converting these actions into relationship value perceptions. Originality/value This paper contributes to the marketing literature by revealing a potential approach to DCM in managing customer relationships. Instead of focusing solely on the content benefit-usage link to support engagement, this paper reveals the potential of helpfulness as a brand-initiated DCM engagement trigger in engaging customers with the brand, vis-a-vis the content.