The Role of Social Capital in Shaping Consumer Engagement within Online Brand Communities

How stories generate consumer engagement: An exploratory study

“…Our study also reveals that story-based engagement has a clear interactive nature, which accords with previous studies on CE (Vivek et al, 2012;Vivek et al, 2014). Consumers engage as a result of the story elements with the brand, the advertisement itself, and also with the other viewers and commentators (Bowden et al, 2017) in a multifaceted and social fashion. The findings show that the story serves as a starting point for the emergence of feelings or thoughtprocessing action, but that these emotions and thoughts also often involve other consumers, whether intentionally or not (Dessart et al, 2015).…”

“…It is important to understand the interactive nature of engagement, because some comments are clearly directed at the brand or advertisement, others at the consumers, and others at several objects at the same time. While the study shows that the branded content remains the starting point of discussions (Bowden, 2009;, the results support previous studies by showing that consumers can engage with multiple objects at the same time (Dessart, 2017;Maslowska et al, 2017) and that engagement with one object can influence or shape engagement with another object (Sim & Plewa, 2017, Bowden et al, 2017 or subject. The interactive nature of engagement thus supports that consumers can be the subjects of CE, but also the objects of other's CE.…”

“…52). While the dimensionality of the constructs can lead to assimilate them, a key difference between brand experiences and CE is indeed that the former are non-motivational (Brakus et al, 2009;Phillips & McQuarrie, 2010), whereas CE is (Brodie et al, 2011;Higgins & Scholer, 2009, Bowden et al 2017Harrigan et al 2017), meaning that if a consumer engages with a brand or other object, he actively and volitionally seeks interaction with it. This distinction has been further verified by Hepola, Karjaluoto, & Hintikka (2017), who also highlight that engagement does not hold a sensory aspect.…”

“…A netnographic approach is taken to Dove's digital video storytelling to analyze how audiences respond to and engage with storytelling content in a social media environment. Such findings should inspire appropriate brand strategies using storytelling content conducive to higher levels of CE, through properly calibrate the use of specific story elements and anticipate their consequences, whether positive or negative (Bowden et al, 2017). Brodie et al (2011, p. 2) define engagement as 'a psychological state that occurs through interactive, co-creative consumer experiences with a focal agent/object'.…”

“…Brodie et al (2011, p. 2) define engagement as 'a psychological state that occurs through interactive, co-creative consumer experiences with a focal agent/object'. Although definitions and views of the concept vary, consumer engagement is generally understood as a motivational context-dependent state (Brodie et al, 2011;Higgins & Scholer, 2009, Bowden et al 2017Harrigan et al 2018), which has a valence (i.e., positive or negative) (Brodie et al, 2011;Hollebeek & Chen, 2014;Bowden et al, 2017) and involves a subject (i.e., the consumer) and an object (e.g. brand, company, service, advertisement, etc.…”