Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of culture, personality, and motivation on social and content value, which in turn affect brand equity in social media brand community (SMBC) setting. Design/methodology/approach Online surveys were conducted with 595 SMBC participants in China and the USA. AMOS is used in SEM analysis. Findings Consumers with collectivistic, extroverted, and extrinsic orientation experience social value through social media participation. In contrast, consumers with individualistic and intrinsic orientation demonstrate content value. Furthermore, Chinese consumers show more social value and the US consumers more content value. Accordingly, the effect of social value (content value) on brand equity is stronger for Chinese (US) consumers. Research limitations/implications Culture was assessed only by individualism/collectivism, personality by extroversion/introversion and motivation by extrinsic/intrinsic. Future research should verify external generalizability beyond China and the USA. Practical implications Enhanced social and content value through consumers’ social media participation can increase brand equity. Thus, companies should motivate consumers to experience more value via social media participation, and, cultivate a multicultural climate and facilitate the exchange of culture. Originality/value First, this research redefines customer value into two components: social and content value. Second, this paper is the first to investigate the antecedents (i.e. culture, personality, and motivation) and the consequence (i.e. brand equity) of customer value in social media community settings. Third, this study illustrates differences in social media customer value experiences of Chinese vs US consumers.

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The universal popularity of social media enable consumers to experience their customer value in this new media. Hence, it is necessary for marketing researchers to investigate the antecedents and consequences of customer value in social media. However, it appears that no study is conducted on this topic. In order to fill this void, we constructed a research model that incorporated flow experience as the endogenous variable, interdependence self-construal and independent self-construal as exogenous variables, as well as social value and content value as mediating variables. Based upon the data from a sample of 437 social media consumers collected through an online survey and through the analysis of the data with the help of structural equation modeling, we found that consumers' interdependent self-construal has a positive effect on their social value while consumers' independent self-construal has a positive effect on their content value, that both social value and content value can enhance consumers' flow experience respectively.  Index Terms-social media, self-construal, customer value, flow

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