Brand loyalty: the role of engagement

My latest paper “Unveiling heterogeneous engagement-based loyalty in brand communities” is now available online in the European Journal of Marketing.

This paper shows that people can be segmented into three broad categories, in terms of how they engage with brands in social media. The categories allow managers to segment members of an online community (a Facebook page, or Instagram profile) based on their engagement style.

Most importantly, the segments are distinguished not just in terms of how they engage, but based on how their engagement type makes them  loyal to a brand. These categories are:

• Emotional engagers: these people are loyal to a brand because they can engage emotionally with it online, that is to say through enjoyable and pleasurable interactions.
• Thinkers: these members develop loyalty to a brand through mental involvement with the brand, i.e. by paying attention to the brand and being cognitively absorbed in their interactions with it.
• Active engagers: this segment becomes loyal by actively sharing with the brand (through comments for instance), learning from it and showing support for it. Taking action online is an essential step to develop loyalty.

The paper collected data from close to 1000 Facebook users in French, Spanish and English.

The paper can be accessed here in pre-print and you can leave a comment in this space if you wish a full-text PDF.

I hope you enjoy reading it!

Full reference: Laurence Dessart, Joaquín Aldás-Manzano, Cleopatra Veloutsou, (2019) “Unveiling heterogeneous engagement-based loyalty in brand communities”, European Journal of Marketing, https://doi.org/10.1108/EJM-11-2017-0818