Social media content aesthetic quality and customer engagement: The mediating role of entertainment and impacts on brand love and loyalty

Abstract

Customer engagement is a key metric for gauging brands' social media success. Luxury fashion brands increasingly use social media to connect with customers. This paper tests a model of the antecedents and consequences of engagement with luxury fashion brands on social media. Developing a content aesthetic quality scale with a sample of 1166 buyers of luxury fashion brands, we identify two routes for how social media content can augment brand loyalty and foster brand love for luxury fashion brands. We reveal that the effectiveness of social media content in generating customer brand engagement depends on its ability to be entertaining. Specifically, our findings demonstrate that entertainment affects customer engagement and mediates the relationship between content marketing (specifically, content aesthetic quality and celebrity endorsement) and customer engagement with luxury fashion brands. Customer engagement fosters brand loyalty and brand love. Managerial implications for luxury brand managers and social media marketers are discussed.