Consumer Social Network Brand Identification and Personal Branding. How Do Social Network Users Choose Among Brand Sites?

Wioleta Kucharska

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2954929

Abstract

Brands’ social networking sites (fan pages) are increasingly attracting the attention of scientists and managers intrigued by their potential application for brand value creation. The aim of this research is to understand better how users choose among social networking sites as an act of brand identification. The study presents a new model whose structure of identification drivers for social networking brand sites varies for customer brand identification in the real and virtual worlds. The presented model reveals that personal branding is a planned effect of brand identification and it is crucial for brand value creation in social networks.

Highlights

Building brand value in hyper-competition conditions is a serious contemporary management challenge (Bogner & Barr, 2000)
The path coefficient in the relationship “Customer social network Brand Identification (CsnBI)-personal brand” equaled 0.85 (p < 0.001), whereas “CsnBI-brand loyalty” equaled 0.4 (p < 0.001). Both of them are statistically significant, but it is worth noticing that CsnBI relation to “personal branding” variable is strong
The results imply that personal branding is a crucial, planned effect of the customer social network brand’s identification

Summary

Introduction

Building brand value in hyper-competition conditions is a serious contemporary management challenge (Bogner & Barr, 2000). Companies expect marketing departments, perceived as cost generators, to provide an adequate return on costs incurred on investment and build a certain brand value based on market share, income, and profits generated by the Wioleta Kucharska ABOUT THE AUTHOR. Wioleta Kucharska, PhD engineering holds an assistant professor position at the Management and Economy Faculty of the Marketing Department, Gdansk University of Technology, Poland. She has 12 years industrial experience in marketing. One of the most spectacular business successes she achieved was 50% brand value growth per year. She focuses on being effective as a manager and teacher and being innovative and genuine as a scientist

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