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Characteristics of social-media marketing strategy and customer-based

brand equity outcomes: A conceptual model

Article in International Journal of Internet Marketing and Advertising · January 2015

DOI: 10.1504/IJIMA.2015.072885

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Int. J. Internet Marketing and Advertising, Vol. 9, No. 4, 2015 321

Characteristics of social-media marketing strategy

and customer-based brand equity outcomes:
a conceptual model

Phuoc H.M. Pham

College of Business and Innovation, MS # 103,
University of Toledo,
Toledo, OH 43606, USA
Fax: (419) 530-4610
Email: Phuoc.pham@utoledo.edu

Bashar S. Gammoh*
Department of Marketing and International Business,
College of Business and Innovation, MS # 103,
University of Toledo,
Toledo, OH 43606, USA
Fax: (419) 530-4610
Email: bashar.gammoh@utoledo.edu
*Corresponding author

Abstract: Existing research support the importance of social media marketing

in building brand equity and creating communities around the brand. Still, the
questions of what kind and what level of social media marketing activities are
needed to help firms build customer-based brand equity (CBBE) are not
properly addressed. Yet, these insights are extremely important for any
company to develop its social media marketing strategy effectively. This paper
extends the extant literature by addressing the questions of choices, conditions,
and potential impacts of different social media channels on CBBE. More
specifically, this study develops a conceptual model to examine the differential
influence of the following four dimensions of social media marketing strategy:
variety, diversity, intensity, and connectivity on different components of CBBE
model. Examining the differential influence of these dimensions of social
media marketing strategy on CBBE is important and holds significant
implications.

Keywords: social media; social media marketing; social media marketing

strategy; customer-based brand equity; CBBE; brand building.

Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Pham, P.H.M. and

Gammoh, B.S. (2015) ‘Characteristics of social-media marketing strategy and
customer-based brand equity outcomes: a conceptual model’, Int. J. Internet
Marketing and Advertising, Vol. 9, No. 4, pp.321–337.

Biographical notes: Phuoc H.M. Pham is a PhD student in the College of

Business and Innovation at the University of Toledo, Ohio, USA. He received
his BA in Industrial Management from University of Technology, Ho Chi Minh
City, Vietnam in 2002 and MBA in Marketing from Murray State University,
Kentucky, USA in 2012. Before returning for his PhD, he enjoyed a ten year

Copyright © 2015 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

322 P.H.M. Pham and B.S. Gammoh

career as a Sales and Marketing Executive. His articles have been published in
conference proceedings including Decision Sciences Institute, National
Conference in Sales Management, and Academy of Marketing Science. His
research interests include new product development, branding, and marketing
and supply chain interface.

Bashar S. Gammoh is currently an Associate Professor of Marketing, College

of Business and Innovation, at University of Toledo, Toledo, USA. His major
research interests are in the areas of marketing strategy and brand management.
His research has appeared in European Journal of Marketing, International
Journal of Electronic Commerce, Journal of Global Marketing, Journal of
Personal Selling and Sales Management, Journal of Product and Brand
Management, Psychology and Marketing and Marketing Letters, among others.

This paper is a revised and expanded version of a paper entitled ‘Characteristics

of social-media marketing strategy and customer-based brand equity outcomes:
a conceptual model’ presented at the Academy of Marketing Science Annual
Conference, Denver, Colorado, 12–14 May 2015.

1 Introduction

Nowadays, social media is so widely used that 93% of social media users believe that
companies should have a social media presence (Cone, 2008). Some industry reports
indicate that 49% of social media users have made a purchase decision based on the
information they found through social media sites; 60% said they were likely to use
social media sites to pass along information to others online; and 45% of those who
searched for information via social media sites engaged in word-of-mouth (DEI
Worldwide, 2008). Furthermore, according to Coremetrics (2010), social media is the
fastest-growing marketing channel in the world. BIA/Kelsey predicts US social media
advertisement would reach $11 billion in 2017. Social media is increasingly recognised
by companies as an important and efficient marketing channel to connect with existing
and prospective consumers. As stated by Argenti (2011, p.61), “embracing social media
is no longer a strategic business option, but a necessity, and a huge opportunity”.
Compared to traditional media, social media have many advantages as they not only
facilitate the processes of connecting businesses to consumers, nurturing their
relationships but also give the users active roles to manage those processes. Social media
provide online users with tools to interact with companies and other users. Laroche et al.
(2012) pointed out that people like the idea of contributing, creating, and joining
communities to fulfil needs of belongingness, being socially connected and recognised or
simply enjoying interactions with other like-minded members. However, when brands
and consumers co-create brand stories, owners no longer have complete control of their
brands (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2010). The construction of brands now is impacted not
only merely by brand owners but also fairly by individuals and consumers groups on
various social media platforms. These interactions impact significantly the companies’
marketing performance in general and branding in particular. Therefore, marketers have
to pay attention to the way they do marketing on social media and what people talk about
their brands.
 Characteristics of social-media marketing strategy and CBBE outcomes 323

Aware of these changes, most researchers focused their efforts on studying issues
related to social media and branding from consumers’ side at the individual or group
level including social media adoption and practice (Gangadharbatla, 2008), the
interactions and dynamics of brand communities (de Chernatony and Christodoulides,
2004; de Valck et al., 2009), and online consumer behaviours. However, very few studies
investigated the impact of firms’ social media activities, particularly social media
marketing, on building and managing brand equity at the firms’ level. So far, social
media marketing activities are found to have strong influence on brands’ reputation (Kim
and Ko, 2010) and brand equity (Kim and Ko, 2012). They are also believed to help
companies increase brand awareness and fortify brand trust (Laroche et al., 2012), brand
loyalty (Shen and Bissell, 2013) and brand relationship (Michaelidou et al., 2011; Trainor
et al., 2014) because they assist communities building (Goh et al., 2013; Schau et al.,
2009), engage these users into companies activities (Jarvinen et al., 2012), and generate
positive word-of-mouth (Chen et al., 2011; Chevalier and Mayzlin, 2006). Still, the
questions of what level and what kind of social media marketing activities are needed to
help firms build customer-based brand equity (CBBE) and achieve competitive
advantages are not properly addressed. Yet, these concerns are extremely important for
any company to develop its social media marketing strategy effectively.
In summary, despite that several scholars recognise the importance of social media
marketing in building brand equity and creating communities around the brand, very little
research studies the effect of different dimensions of social media marketing strategy on
important CBBE outcomes such as brand awareness, brand judgements, brand feeling
and finally brand resonance. In particular, in our study, we focus our attention on the
following four dimensions of social media marketing strategy: variety, diversity,
intensity, and connectivity. Variety refers to the different group of social media platforms
types that are selected by a company within their social media marketing strategy.
Diversity addresses the range of different marketing activities (e.g., product development,
customer relationship management) in which the brand utilises social media efforts.
Intensity can be viewed as the degree those activities are carried out across the different
platforms to achieve the brands’ goals. And connectivity expresses how well those
platforms are linked together and work as a whole to help brand achieve brand strategy.
Designing a social media marketing strategy involves several important choices and
decisions. For example, how many different social media platforms and applications a
brand should use? Is it the more the better? Across how many different marketing
activities marketers should apply social media efforts? How frequently should the brand
organise online social media events and activities? How should these platforms be
connected to each other? Examining the differential influence of these dimensions of
social media marketing strategy on different components of CBBE is important and holds
significant theoretical and practical implications.
The remaining sections of this paper are organised as follows. First, we briefly define
social media, social media marketing, and CBBE and summarise existing research that
examined the impact of social media marketing on several dimensions of CBBE. Next,
we present our conceptual model in which we outline the differential impact of specific
characteristics of social media marketing strategy on CBBE outcomes. In conclusion, we
offer some important practical implications of our research and suggest some avenues for
future research.
324 P.H.M. Pham and B.S. Gammoh

2 Literature review

In what follows, we provide a brief introduction to the concepts of social media and
CBBE followed with a detailed review of existing research that examined the impact of
social media marketing on CBBE.

2.1 Social media and social media marketing

2.1.1 Social media
In this paper, we refer to social media as the set of connectivity-enabled applications that
facilitate interaction and the publication, exchange, and co-creation of information among
firms and their networked communities of customers (Larson and Watson, 2011). Social
media take a variety of forms, including social networks, weblogs, social blogs,
micro-blogging, wikis, podcasts, pictures, video, rating and social bookmarking (Kaplan
and Haenlein, 2010).

2.1.2 Types of social media

Based on the two unique characteristics of social media shown in Table 1, which are
media richness and self-disclosure, Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) categorise social media
into six types: collaborative projects (e.g., Wikipedia), blogs and microblogs (e.g.,
Twitter), content communities (e.g., YouTube and Daily Motion), social networking sites
(e.g., Facebook), virtual game worlds (e.g., World of Warcraft), and virtual social worlds
(e.g., Second Life). Currently, the most popular social media platforms used by
companies are Facebook, Twitter and YouTube (Wright and Hinson, 2012).
Table 1 Classification of social media

Social presence/media richness

Low Medium High
Self-presentation/ High Blogs Social networking Virtual social
self-disclosure sites (Facebook) worlds
(Second Life)
Low Collaborative Content Virtual game
projects communities world (World of
(Wikipedia) (YouTube) Warcraft)
Source: Adapted from Kaplan and Haenlein (2010)
For businesses, the platform itself does not generate value, but how a particular social
media platform is used and the information that is created and shared on these platforms
do (e.g., Table 2; Culnan et al., 2010). For example, several companies are already using
social networking sites to support the creation of brand communities (Muniz and
O’Guinn, 2001) or for marketing research in the context of netnography (Kozinets,
1998). Several studies argue that companies now employ social media as a medium for
generatively co-creating a wide array of informational objects ranging from product
designs to advertising campaigns to organisational processes (Berthon et al., 2008; Etgar,
2008; Fournier and Avery, 2011). For example, ToyotaOwnersOnline.com is a place
where not only Toyota owners can provide true insight and experience with the car but
 Characteristics of social-media marketing strategy and CBBE outcomes 325

also other people who are interested in cars can question and get feedback from the other
owners. This channel helps generate much awareness and sales without much effort from
the company.
Table 2 Motives of companies to engage in social media applications

Activity supported Motive of value

Marketing (advertising, PR, branding, etc.) Drive traffic, viral marketing, customer loyalty,
customer retention
Sales Increase revenue
Customer service/support Cost saving, revenue, customer satisfaction
Product development Increase fit to market, cost saving

2.1.3 Social media marketing

The literature so far has not reached a common agreement on the definition of social
media marketing. Some researchers view it as process of generating viral communication
among online users (e.g., Pentina and Koh, 2012), while others consider it as process to
popularise their websites by gaining awareness on social media sites and presenting in
online communities (Tuan and Moretti, 2013) or simply define it as the utilisation of
social media channels to promote companies and their products (Barefoot and Szabo,
2010). However, there are some common components among those definitions that it
uses social media platforms (Pentina and Koh, 2012; Tuan and Moretti, 2013) to provide
values (entertainment, news, etc.) (Kim and Ko, 2012; Shen and Bissell, 2013) to online
users and encourage these users to spread out those contents all over their networks
(Pentina et al., 2012; Kumar et al., 2013). Considering social media marketing is a subset
of relationship marketing (Tuan and Moretti, 2013) and marketing, which is defined as
“the activities, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering,
and exchanging offerings that have value for consumers, clients, partners, and society at
large”, we view social media marketing as a company’s process of creating and
promoting online marketing-related activities on social media platforms that offer values
to its stakeholders (Drury, 2008). Social media marketing activities include entertainment
(Kim and Ko, 2012), information sharing, promotion (Shen and Bissell, 2013), customer
service, and crowdsourcing and marketing research. Social media marketing success
usually referred to its ability to engage online users (Pentina et al., 2014), establishing
and developing customer relationship.

2.2 Customer-based brand equity

CBBE is viewed as “the differential effect that brand knowledge has on customer
response to the marketing of that brand” [Keller, (2013), p.69]. By this definition, the
brands’ marketing activities and programs are premises that create and trigger customers’
brand knowledge, which is the overall cognitive representation of the brand in customer
mind (Peter and Olson, 2001). Brand awareness and brand image are two most important
components of brand knowledge (Keller, 2003). Brand awareness shows how well a
brand resides in customer mind, indicating the ability a consumer to recall or recognise
that brand (Rossiter and Percy, 1987), while brand image specifies what that brand is
associated with and how favourable, strong and unique these associations contribute most
326 P.H.M. Pham and B.S. Gammoh

to the customer’s responses to different brands (Keller, 1993). Therefore, through

marketing activities, marketers try to create and impact these dimensions of brand
knowledge in customers mind, influencing and igniting positive customers’ reactions
toward the brands. To build brand equity, Keller (2013) suggest a CBBE pyramid model,
which consists of six brand building blocks containing brand salience, brand
performance, brand imagery, brand judgements, brand feelings, and brand resonance.
According to him, marketers first have to build brand salience by linking the brand in
customers’ mind with certain products or needs associations to generate brand awareness
and high levels of brand recognition and recall. Then, both functional/physical needs
(brand performance block) and social needs (brand imagery block) of customers need to
be satisfied to establish point-of-parity and point-of-difference for the brand. On the next
step, all marketing activities should be focused on stimulating customers’ positive
reactions including favourable judgements and desired emotional responses to the brand.
Finally, to reach to the top of the pyramid, marketers can put their efforts to maximise
brand resonance by enhancing customers brand attachment, brand loyalty, and
engagement with the brand and the community of brand users.

2.3 Social media marketing and CBBE

Companies nowadays try to harness the power of global reach but personal touch with
low cost of social media to build their brands and alleviate their marketing performance.
A research from 2,100 companies by Harvard Business Review Analytic service in 2010
reveals that 87% of effective social media business users promote their brand, products,
and service via these channels. For small and medium sized companies, Pentina et al.
(2012) find out that these firms’ social media marketing follows recognisable patterns,
which are calculative pragmatists, cautious watchers, and proactive strategists.
Calculative pragmatists, account for 48% of the sample, are those companies that only
choose well-known social media platforms to increase brand awareness and
word-of-mouth, directing customers to their physical distributions. Proactive strategists,
account for 42% of the sample, on the other hand, actively search for new opportunities
through all available social media platforms and develop proper capabilities to achieve
competitive advantages. Cautious watchers (about 10% of the sample) conservatively
adopt social media marketing to be not left behind and avoid losing their market
positions.
Social media marketing activities are found to have positive effects on brand equity
(Kim and Ko, 2012) and brand attitudes (Schivinski and Dabrowski, 2014), which is an
important component of CBBE symbolising the overall customers’ evaluation toward
brands based on the reactions to brand-related stimuli (Murphy and Zajonc, 1993). They
are also believed to help companies increase brand awareness and fortify brand reputation
and brand trust (Kim and Ko, 2010; Laroche et al., 2012), improve brand loyalty (Shen
and Bissell, 2013) and enhance brand relationships (Trainor et al., 2014) because they
assist communities building (Goh et al., 2013; Schau et al., 2009), engage these users into
companies activities (Jarvinen et al., 2012), and generate positive word-of-mouth
(Kozinets et al., 2010; Chevalier and Mayzlin, 2006). For example, Shen and Bissell
(2013) prove that companies can improve brand awareness and brand image through
enhancing customer engagement on SNS, resulting in brand loyalty reinforcement.
Furthermore, through interacting with companies, brands and other customers, customers
improve their brand experience and feeling (Mangold and Faulds, 2009).
 Characteristics of social-media marketing strategy and CBBE outcomes 327

In conclusion, previous studies indicate that social media marketing may have a
positive impact on brand equity in general. However, there still are a lot of important
questions need to be addressed with regards to the effect of different social media
activities on different components of the CBBE pyramid. What level and what kind of
social media marketing activities are needed to help firms build CBBE and achieve
competitive advantages. Currently, companies try to find the best practices on different
types of social media places but they have less knowledge about the potential effects of
being on different types of social media platforms on CBBE. Furthermore, the differential
impact of different social media activities on CBBE, how they are different from each
other, and which one have the most impact on which component of CBBE pyramid are
not clear. Addressing those issues would help marketing managers to have clear social
media marketing strategy to build CBBE and improve marketing performance.

3 Research propositions

Our conceptual models (see Figure 1) propose and examine the influence of important
dimensions of social media marketing strategy on CBBE. More specifically, we build
research propositions regarding the differential impact of the following dimensions of
social media marketing strategy: variety, diversity, intensity, and connectivity on different
components of CBBE. In what follows, we define each one of these four dimensions and
articulate their potential differential effect on different components of the CBBE model.

Figure 1 Conceptual model

3.1 Variety of social media marketing strategy and CBBE outcomes

Variety refers to how many different social media platforms and applications are being
used in the brand social media marketing strategy. Nowadays, there are wide ranges of
social media platforms and applications for anyone to choose for almost any purpose.
With its own strengths and functions, each type of social media platforms helps users and
companies reach different communities with different characteristics for different
applications. So it is the company responsibility to choose the proper channels or
328 P.H.M. Pham and B.S. Gammoh

platforms that fit its business strategies, its brands’ strategies, and its culture, etc. (Culnan
et al., 2010). However, there is a dearth in literature that study what best selections of
social media platforms are suitable for particular brand building goals across different
industries, sizes, and cultures and how they incorporate best with company own platforms
(Aral et al., 2013), so companies still look for best practices or other experience to
follow. In this research, we rely on media richness theory to suggest the effects of
companies’ choice of social media platforms on different components of CBBE model.
Media richness theory (Daft and Lengel, 1986) assumes that the aim of any
communication is to address ambiguity and to reduce uncertainty. Daft et al. (1987)
suggest that media differ regarding their richness degree and classify different types of
channels ranging from those with low media richness (e.g., bulletins, documents and
memos) to those with high media richness (e.g., face-to-face communication channels).
Rice (1992) proposes, for improved performance, low richness media should match the
requirements of low social rich tasks while high richness media ought to match the
requirements of high social rich tasks. Richer medium are more personal because it can
convey more verbal and non-verbal information, facilitating better relationship with
parties (Sheer and Chen, 2004).
Based on Kaplan and Haenlein’s (2010) categories of social media, we can see that
blogs, microblogs, social networking sites, and content sharing sites, etc. have different
degree of media richness, so we can expect they have different effect on CBBE. For
example, Kietzmann et al. (2011) suggest that some platforms (e.g., Facebook, Google+,
LinkedIn, etc.) help build relationships whereas others focus on sharing (e.g., YouTube,
Flickr, etc.). SNS’s huge multi-directive connections of users make it precious and
effective channels for marketers to trigger brand awareness, attention, and word-of-mouth
(Coulter and Roggeveen, 2012). And from brand communities created on social network
sites, brand owner are able to increase brand trust, brand loyalty and feeling (Laroche
et al., 2012).
With unique characteristics such as short text messages, instant message delivery, and
updates by subscriptions, micro-blogs are usually considered as important eWOM
branding channels because of their immediacy, substantial touch, easy accessibility
(Hennig-Thurau et al., 2004) and real-time interaction (Dunlap and Lowenthal, 2009)
which helps them impact customers’ purchase intention or even in purchase process
(Barton, 2006). Studying the users’ behaviours from microblog postings of 50 brands in a
13-week period, Jansen et al. (2009) suggest that microblogging surely affect brand
awareness and brand image and that microblog are ideal place for companies to listen to
customers’ feeling about companies’ brands and those of competitors and to conduct viral
marketing campaigns, customer relationship management, and eWOM branding efforts.
Net-based communities built around a theme, idea, product, industry, or hobby, blogs
usually comprise groups of like-mind users who share some common points. Therefore,
the information generated within the groups are easily digested and spread out. In
addition, thanks to their believability, credibility, likeability, and trustworthiness (Droge
et al., 2010), blogs are found to be able to generate brand differentiation by their abilities
to disseminate news stories of those who are either novices or experts, to connect to
different types of viewers, and to share experiences of experts (Singh et al., 2008), which
generate awareness, engagement, word-of-mouth, trust, brand loyalty and purchase
intentions (Hsu et al., 2013).
Besides to provide entertainment value to viewers, companies nowadays utilise
content sharing platforms (e.g., YouTube) to inform, educate, and conduct viral
 Characteristics of social-media marketing strategy and CBBE outcomes 329

campaigns about their products, missions, advertisements, etc. to improve companies’

identity and brands (Waters and Jones, 2011), relationship building and engagement
(Jarboe, 2009). It is advised that creating videos of brand stories may be the best methods
of generating strong mental impressions of the brand in the users’ minds (Brown, 2005)
because of the combination of verbal, vocal, and visual. It is also a must for music
industry to utilised YouTube to generate customers’ interest and awareness (Salo et al.,
2011). With its richness in contents, content sharing sites are believed to help build point
of parity and point of difference.
Proposition 1 Therefore, we propose that while being on social media platforms would
help establish brand awareness, each type would have different effect on
CBBE pyramid. Specifically, blogs and microblogs are suitable for
building brand performance and brand judgement; content sharing sites
for building brand imagery and brand feeling; and social networking sites
are for building brand resonance.

3.2 Diversity of social media marketing strategy and CBBE outcomes

Diversity refers to the variety of marketing activities in which the brand utilises social
media efforts. Social media applications are varied across different marketing activities
from product development, to sales and customer relationship management. For example,
several companies are already using social networking sites to support the creation of
brand communities (Muniz and O’Guinn, 2001) or for marketing research in the context
of netnography (Kozinets, 1998). Berthon et al. (2008), Etgar (2008), and Fournier and
Avery (2011) prove companies now employ social media as a medium for generatively
co-creating a wide array of informational objects ranging from product designs to
advertising campaigns to organisational processes. Pentina et al. (2012) find out that
SME use social media to try new approach to marketing, to cut advertising expenses, to
increase traffic to their physical locations and to reinforce customer engagement. The
success of social media marketing rests on its ability to engage consumer because the
more they involve, the more they feel buy-in, improve brand experience, loyalty and
willing to adopt new products.
More and more companies now use online environment as its main communication
channel because the low cost and the ability to reach not only more than 2 billion online
users but also the right needs (customised messages). According to Qualman (2011), 93%
of businesses use social networking site for marketing and branding. Those companies
place their advertisement in their websites or others’, search engines (e.g., Google), etc.
They also place their coupons, free sample, and promotion codes in search engines to
attract people to their websites, to enhance brand awareness and loyalty, and to increase
sales. However, these promotion activities require little engagement from the customers
(Chan and Guillet, 2011; Shen and Bissell, 2013). They basically just watch, like the
posts, give few comments (if any), and share with their friends occasionally (Shen and
Bissell, 2013). Entertainment activities (e.g., tips, rewards, joke, story, etc.) are a way
companies entertain customers and keep them around with the brand. Users are found to
enjoy these undertakings somehow and to improve partly their brand equity (Kim and
Ko, 2012). However, these activities do not involve customers much (Shen and Bissell,
2013), so the effect is considered limited. Therefore, promotion and entertainment
activities would be effective in generating brand awareness and positive affect.
330 P.H.M. Pham and B.S. Gammoh

Social media create a shortcut for companies to do public relation directly without
going through traditional media agents (e.g., TV, press, etc.). Sponsorship, community
events, campaigns, press release, and customer service are processes that companies try
to integrate in social media to utilise their immediate interactions and inexpensive
features. Ahearne et al. (2008) claim that with the help of technology, consumers should
be served quicker and more dependably while the relationship is strengthened. That is
why H&R Block setup its ask-and-answer sessions with its customers in Twitter and
Comcast starts its Twitter-based customer service. By doing that, they have the unique
and frequent opportunities to share information with customers about companies’
products, services, events, and community initiatives and get back information that can
serve to strengthen customer relationships and increase success possibility of building
their brands loyalty. Public are found to increase trust in the companies thanks to their
improved transparency (Distaso and McCorkindale, 2013). By bringing those events,
campaigns online, firms get more supports, participants, and contributions from
communities (Waters and Jones, 2011). The more people involve, the better chance of
success of firms’ campaigns and stronger positive image of firms are. Moreover, a study
of DEI Worldwide (2008) shows that consumers are eager to communicate online with a
brand representatives about a question or concern. And companies’ that have online
customer service, which can solve customers’ issue, are found to have positive brand’s
reputation, and have customers’ stronger perceptions of company trustworthiness,
company benevolence, and attitude towards the brand (Coyle et al., 2012). Hence, public
relation would be best use to improve brand performance and brand judgements.
Online marketing research is another marketing activities conducted by more and
more companies (Patino et al., 2012; Branthwaite and Patterson, 2011). Facebook alone
supports more than 1 billion active users monthly and there are 140 billion friend
connections made (Cohen, 2013). They share almost everything related to their personal
preference, behaviour and brand choice, and feeling, etc. Those are precious yet costless
information for marketers to harvest. Furthermore, marketers can use other tools provided
by social media to get right information they want such as voting, conversation, and
liking, etc. By doing that, brands are proved to be able to generate awareness and interest,
increase trust, reduce perceived risk and encourage buying behaviours (Hajli, 2013),
enhancing brand loyalty (Laroche et al., 2012). As sources of competitive information
and innovation, online users offer brands with product, company, and brand-related ideas
and inspiration to improve their competitive advantages. Research has showed that by
engaging crowds’ power, companies can improve their new product development process
(Droge et al., 2010), reduce time-to-market and new product development cost. Above
all, these activities help brands enhance communication, interaction, and collaboration
with their customers, enriching customers’ brand experience and deepening customers’
relationship with brands (Jussila et al., 2011). Moreover, customers investing their time
and efforts would improve their sense of community belonging, attachment feeling, and
usually the new adopters of new products. Hence, marketing research and crowdsourcing
are suitable to build and strengthen brand resonance
Social media make the ability to receive online order nowadays become easy. Many
companies let customers book their orders right on Facebook, etc. Others (e.g., Nike,
Adidas, Jeans, etc.) setup their own platforms and let customers to customise their own
products and order them. According to Piller et al. (2005) and Franke et al. (2008), via
social media, people love to share a user design with peers and to get feedback. Also,
user communities allow the publications of user generated design, hence providing
 Characteristics of social-media marketing strategy and CBBE outcomes 331

inspiration and examples for an own design. Therefore, by letting customer make their
own products designs and share these designs with others, companies would attract a lot
more customers than traditional way. Those activities also help create brand trust and
facilitate brand action (purchase decision) because people will see real customers buy
real products and comment on them. If the comments come from celebrity, the effect is
even much bigger. This is actually the case of many companies including Lolly Wolly
Doodle, Nike, AstraDirekt, and Die Jeans, etc., which now have their pages and
configurators integrated directly in Facebook site, where their customers can customise
their desired products, share their design, look at the trends and place an order to the
companies. Thus, online sales and support would help improve brand awareness and
brand judgement.

Proposition 2 Different social media marketing activities would generate different

effects on CBBE. Specifically, promotion and entertainment would work
best to create brand awareness; online sales and support and public
relations would be for brand performance and brand judgement; and
marketing research and crowdsourcing would be for brand resonance.

3.3 Intensity of social media marketing strategy and CBBE outcomes

Intensity of activities relates to how frequently the brand organises online events and
activities across the different platforms. More and more people go online and they want
to see their favourite brands in this cyberspace as well quote a practitioners’ study. The
social network site also generates greater expectations of consumers toward brands
(Awata, 2010) because there is a shift in customers’ attention and expectations from
product attributes and service qualities to emotional engagements and experience (Shen
and Bissell, 2013). Customers’ experience comes from their own interaction with brands
or seeing those of others. Therefore, when they check brands’ pages every hour, day, and
week, and find out that there is not much activities, responses, and reactions, they will
feel bored with the brand and decrease their positive emotion toward the brands and may
switch to another because updating the community news and getting timely responses
from companies are two of main reasons for users to join a brand community
(McCorkindale et al., 2013).
From the customer’s standpoint, they have strong expectations about how companies
should interact with them online. Expectations of interactivity encountered at web sites
have been found to positively influence a consumer’s site experience when those
expectations are met (Gould and Coyle, 2002). That is why being active is one of key
requirement for success of a company on a social media platform (Kaplan and Haenlein,
2010) for it improves brand awareness and customer loyalty (Larson and Watson, 2011).
Therefore, in order to improve relationship with customers, companies need to keep their
content updated and to take advantage of social media tools to encourage more
interactions between companies and customers and among customers (Kaplan and
Haenlein, 2010; Trainor et al., 2014). “If you’re going to engage, you can’t engage for
just one day; you have to be engaged every minute”.

Proposition 3 The intensity of social media marketing activities positively moderates

the effect of social media marketing on CBBE.
332 P.H.M. Pham and B.S. Gammoh

3.4 Connectivity of social media marketing strategy and CBBE outcomes

Connectivity refers to how well those platforms are linked together and work as a whole
to help brand achieve brand strategy. This dimension is very important because, as we
mentioned above, each type of social media platforms has different strength and unique
characteristics, assisting build different brand facets and experience to online
communities, so if we do not connect them and encourage customers go through, the
whole brand associations we want to convey to customers cannot be perceived fully.
Connecting them together is the smart way to utilise the best of each social media
platform type to build a whole pictures of brands and avoid fragmenting company
branding strategy effort (Lessnau, 2013).
Normally, each user has different favourite social media platforms and types.
Connecting these platforms and allowing communities to see each other would help
enrich customers’ experience, facilitate active interactions between fans and enhance the
flow of information, improving eWOM, brand awareness and associations (Shen and
Bissell, 2013). Connectivity provides an easy way for customers to get more related
information about the companies and brands and assist customers find the platform they
like most or the community they would love to belong, thereby increase number of fans
and degree of brand satisfaction (Judson et al., 2012). Consumers’ brand trust is also
fortified because providing linkages to those social media platforms is one way to affirm
that those pages belong to the companies and shows both the companies’ abilities to
govern and manage those communities and the strong internal cooperation between IT
department and other business units (Culnan et al., 2010). Therefore, it is advised that
companies should provide links to their social media pages and cross-navigation among
those pages to improve customers’ accessibility (Culnan et al., 2010) and transparency.
Proposition 4 The connectivity of social media marketing strategy positively moderates
the effect of social media marketing on CBBE.

4 Conclusions and directions for future research

This paper has some following contributions. First, it studies how companies can utilise
social media practices to strengthen their CBBE. Second, this research is one of the first
papers that examines four fundamental but important dimensions of social media
marketing strategy: variety, diversity, intensity, and connectivity. Third, this paper extend
the extant literature by addressing the questions of choices, conditions (Weinberg and
Pehlivan, 2011), and impacts of different social media channels on CBBE. The results
provide a framework for building social media marketing strategies and allow managers
to re-evaluate their current approaches.
While being in social media can generate brand awareness, different social media
platforms establish different brand associations, creating different effects on CBBE.
Particularly, blogs and microblogs are found to associate with building brand
performance and brand judgement; content sharing sites can generate brand imagery and
brand feeling; and social networking sites show the purpose of building brand resonance
(brand relationship). Furthermore, different social media activities produce different
impacts on CBBE pyramid. By providing promotion and entertainment information,
companies can get their online users’ attentions. However, positive brand performance
 Characteristics of social-media marketing strategy and CBBE outcomes 333

and judgement can be best generated by opening online sales and support and public
relations. Finally, by engaging online customers in marketing research and
crowdsourcing activities, firms are able to strengthen their brand resonance with their
surround communities. The successfulness of these activities are moderated by their
frequency and connectivity with each other.
The finding of this study also conveys some managerial implications. This paper
helps firms have a better and clearer view of how social media activities can be utilised
effectively and efficiently. The results facilitate the uses of social media based on firms’
branding strategy because the choices of social media channels and activities are shown
to help achieve particular branding objectives. Based on the paper suggestions, firms can
develop a customised social media strategy to accomplish their branding goals. This
paper also offers firms and managers with a tool to re-evaluate their current social media
portfolios as well as their frequency and connectivity. By adjusting and using appropriate
social media choices, firms can have better chances to reach their brand objectives and
improve brand performance. This conceptual model we set forth in this paper needs to be
empirically examined using appropriate samples and accounting for the point of views of
experienced professionals. We suggest that future research can focus on the social media
practices of Fortune 500 because they are well invested and developed. Therefore, clearer
effects, impacts, and implications can be observed.

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