Abstract
This study analyzes marketing communication (MC) impact on brand equity (BE) in social media (SM) seeking to identify mediating role of consumer engagement behavior (CEB) between generated functional and hedonic content on brand equity (BE). The CEB is divided into three levels: consuming, contributing, and creating. A survey-based empirical study with 402 respondents was conducted in the Eastern Europe country Lithuania. The implemented five control variables disclosed new mediation tracks and the good fit of the model, with the main findings of the research being that CEB occurring via SM platforms mediates the relationship between marketing communication and BE. 
 These outcomes suggest that companies seeking to make an impact on BE through CEB in level creation, should develop company-created utilitarian content which may engage consumers, extending the reach of their content and helping to facilitate long-term brand loyalty.
 Keywords: marketing communication; consumer engagement behavior; social media; brand equity.
Highlights
The company and the consumer remain the main marketing communication (MC) participants in sales and marketing (SM), but their positions are different
The pairs of indicators were from the same latent variables and/or had a good theoretical reason to be correlated
Researchers agree that brand equity (BE) is an element of competitive advantage and is formed over the long-term
Summary
The company and the consumer remain the main marketing communication (MC) participants in sales and marketing (SM), but their positions are different. Consumers have become active participants in MC (Noniashvili, Batiashvili, & Griffin, 2014), engaged in content about brand creation that is evaluated as more reliable and possessing a stronger impact on other consumers compared to company created content (CCC) (Berthon, Pitt, Plangger and Shapiro, 2012). It no is longer enough for companies to use one-way communication to create a clear and rich structure of brand knowledge.
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