Something social, something entertaining? How digital content marketing augments consumer experience and brand loyalty

Abstract

Branded content marketing serves as an ongoing conversation between brands and consumers. Creating value-rich information that breaks through the noise and that can accelerate brand building has been a standing challenge for many brands. Informed by extant literature on content marketing, this study proposed a comprehensive theoretical framework that explicates the mechanism of branded content marketing in brand loyalty across both high- and low-product involvement brands. This study applied the classification of consumption values to the context of content marketing, hypothesized, and identified consumers’ experiential evaluation as an underlying mechanism of content marketing accounting for brand loyalty. Specifically, for a high-product involvement brand (i.e., Lenovo), consumers’ perceived informative and entertainment value of branded content, as well as the perceived functional value of the brand’s YouTube channel, positively shape their experiential evaluation of the brand, which in turn, leads to greater brand loyalty. For a low-product involvement brand (i.e., Nescafé), consumers’ derived entertainment and social value of branded content, as well as the functional value of its YouTube channel, jointly affect consumers’ experiential evaluation, which subsequently contributes to elevated brand loyalty.

Keywords:

• Branded content marketing
• consumption values
• experiential perspective
• brand loyalty
• YouTube

Acknowledgment

The authors also thank the reviewers and editors for their guidance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Since this current study is a part of an on-going project and builds on the findings of a previous study, the results of the pretests in this manuscript have also appeared in a published article. However, the results of the main study, which constitute the focal contributions of the current study, are new and have not been published elsewhere.

Additional information

Funding

This study is funded by the first author’s Tier 1 grant from the Ministry of Education, Singapore (M4012201.060).

Notes on contributors

Chen Lou

Chen Lou (Ph.D., Michigan State University) is an Assistant Professor of Integrated Marketing Communication in the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her research focuses on consumer psychology, brand communication, and consumer analytics. From this perspective, she has investigated how consumers process information and the mechanisms through which marketing communications affect consumer behavior. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Advertising, Journal of Interactive Advertising, Journal of Product & Brand Management, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Media Psychology, among others.

Quan Xie

Quan Xie (Ph.D., Ohio University) is an assistant Professor of Advertising in the Temerlin Advertising Institute at Southern Methodist University. Her primary research interests center on the effects and implications of digital technology in advertising and digital marketing communications. She has published in the Journal of Advertising, Journal of Interactive Advertising, Journal of Current Issues and Research in Advertising, International Journal of Strategic Communication, Journal of Promotion Management, among others.