روابط برند مصرف کننده در پلت فرم رسانه های اجتماعی Examining consumer-brand relationships on social media platforms

Introduction With the emergence of social media, the communication means between customers and companies have transformed significantly (Aladwani, 2014). The most popular social media platforms include Facebook, Twitter and YouTube (Nisar and Whitehead, 2016). The popularity of social media platforms emphasizes the shifts in media consumption (Twitter, 2014). According to Rapp et al. (2013), around 88 percent of the companies including media, IT and telecommunication, FMCG and retail, travel and leisure have already initiated to use various social media platforms and among them approximately 42 percent have fully incorporated different social media sites into their marketing strategies. Social media is thus a more efficient way to find new customers and to maintain, retain the existing customers (Luo et al., 2015). Recently, social media is also highlighted as one of the dominant 2016-2018 research priorities area of Marketing Science Institute (2016). However, there is a dearth of existing study investigating why individuals communicate with brands using social media platforms. Still, there is limited number of academic study regarding examining customer-brand relationships through social media platforms. The present research intends to fill these research gaps and investigate the customer-brand relationship on social media platforms and to examine how consumer-brand relationships affect brand loyalty and word of mouth when mediated by brand trust considering online brand communities on social media platforms. This will be accomplished by fulfilling the following research questions: RQ1. Why do customers involve, satisfy and committed with brands through social media platforms? RQ2. Does following a brand through online brand communities on social media platforms influence brand trust, brand loyalty and word of mouth? Customers are rapidly shifting from traditional communication sources to social media to share their views, information and ideas. Thus, companies require considering customerbrand relationship management through internet, especially on social media platforms (Ku et al., 2013). Hence, the present paper is designed to investigate the customer-brand relationship in online brand communities considering social media platforms that will be useful and helpful for practitioners.