Digital Content Marketing's Role in Fostering Consumer Engagement, Trust, and Value: Framework, Fundamental Propositions, and Implications

Abstract

In a landscape of growing online consumer/firm interactions, digital content marketing (DCM) which aims to foster consumers' brand engagement and trust, is on the rise. However, despite significant practitioner interest, academic DCM research is lagging, resulting in an important knowledge gap. Based on an extensive review, we conceptualize DCM as the creation and dissemination of relevant, valuable brand-related content to current or prospective customers on digital platforms to develop their favorable brand engagement, trust, and relationships (vs. directly persuading consumers to purchase). We also develop a conceptual framework that identifies important consumer-based DCM antecedents, including uses-and-gratifications (U&G)-informed functional, hedonic, and authenticity-based motives for DCM interactions. DCM's first-tier, intra-interaction consequences include consumers' cognitive, emotional, and behavioral engagement that foster brand-related sense-making, identification, and citizenship behaviors, respectively. These in turn trigger DCM's second-tier, extra-interaction consequences of brand trust and attitude, which successively contribute to the development of DCM's third-tier, value-based consequences of consumer and firm-based brand equity. We summarize our findings in a set of Fundamental Propositions (FPs) of DCM and conclude by deriving key implications from our analyses.