Looking beneath the surface: how brands led to consumer engagement in social media
It is undeniable that the strong growth of social media and content generated in them is presented as a rising tide that came to stay! We are facing a change of structural nature, requiring brands to understand that shift and to adapt their strategies as they start looking at consumers as active partners, developing with them a close relationship, collaborative, deeply relational, reinforcing and strengthening the bond and an emotional connection. This fact led to an explosion of interest in consumer engagement. The opportunities presented by social media to help build close relationships with consumers seem to have attracted the increasing interest of practitioners in a wide variety of industries worldwide. Academic scholarship consumer engagement, however, has lagged practice and its theoretical foundation is relatively underdeveloped and a better understanding of the concept and their drivers is essential to develop accurate strategies. This paper seeks to address some of these issues. From the universe of brands, two popular fashion brands (Cubanas and Paez) were selected, based on RankUPT[1] a statistics website aimed at the analysis of Facebook's activity in Portugal that makes a daily measurement of homepages, based on the number of fans. A qualitative netnographic study was conducted, through a non interventionist observational technique, added with a collection of qualitative behavioral data which took place between March and December 2015, and also considering the use of secondary data for the descriptive analysis of the brands in question. Metrics used for measuring engagement were the most commonly used in other studies (e.g. likes, sharing, commenting) along with the de Vries, Gensler and Leeflang [2] Cvijiki and Michaheles [3] and Malhotra, Malhotra and See [4] criteria for the drivers of engagement. The results are discussed and the academic and business implications of the study are examined, in particular for branding and relationship marketing.