Do Social Endorsements Help or Hurt Brands? Impact of Social Endorsements on Customer Behavioral Intentions

Abstract

Social networking site (SNS) users are likely not aware of what they click to “like”, to “love”, or to “wow”, acts as their social endorsements which exert potential social influences on their social circles. Also, extant studies have less attention to this social endorsement phenomenon as well as its effects on the endorsed brand’s online social community outcomes and marketing performance. This study conceptualized social endorsements with two dimensions (friend endorsement and crowd endorsement) and investigated their two effects (awareness and persuasive) on online customer brand community outcomes (e.g., endorsements from other users) and marketing performances (e.g., intention to purchase endorsed products) across three studies. In the form of an online survey with 166 participants, study 1 investigated the prevalence of social endorsements and its identity-expressive behavior. With 379 participants from Amazon Mturk respondents, Study 2 was an experiment to examine the awareness effect of social endorsements. The result of study 2 showed that social endorsements from friends and the crowd trigger the next endorsements from other users which indicates the “endorsement contagion effects” in SNSs. Study 2 elucidated the mechanism of awareness effects of social endorsement by underlining the mediating roles of brand credibility and brand passion. The results disclosed the mediating role of brand credibility on the effect of both friend endorsements and crowd endorsements on the intention to endorse. Distinctively, obsessive brand passion mediates the relationship between friend endorsements and the intention to endorse while harmonious band passion is found to be the mediator between crowd endorsement and the intention to endorse. Study 3 was another experiment with 333 respondents from Amazon Mturk, for the persuasive effect of social endorsements on the choice of the endorsed brand’s identity-expressive products. The results revealed that friend endorsement was stronger than crowd endorsement regarding this positive and direct impact. Study 3 unveiled an insight when an identity-expressive brand becomes popular; it suffers from a “social endorsement penalty”, which is a weakening of the positive and direct effect of crowd endorsement on purchase intention. Study 3 further underlined the mechanism of the persuasive effects of social endorsements on the choice of identity-expressive products by examining the mediation roles of psychological motives. The result revealed a critical finding that both friend endorsement and crowd endorsement activate the assimilation leading to an interest in purchasing the identity-expressive product. Our findings make meaningful contributions to social endorsement logic and provide a guideline for managers on improving brand and marketing performance in a product life cycle from utilizing social endorsements.