With the advent of interactive Web 2.0 (and beyond) technologies, the role of consumer brand engagement (CBE), which focuses on the consumer’s investment in their brand interactions, is of rapidly growing importance. Despite growing recognition of CBE’s importance in virtual brand communities, empirically-derived insight into its drivers, dynamics, and outcomes remains limited, as investigated in this study. Responding to this gap, we explore the effect of consumers’ brand community identification and reward on CBE, which we posit to subsequently affect brand loyalty. To investigate our hypotheses, we conducted a survey with 602 Facebook users. Our structural equation modeling results reveal brand community identification’s and reward’s positive effect on CBE, and a positive effect of CBE on brand loyalty. In addition, our findings reveal CBE’s partial mediating effect in the association of brand community identification and reward with brand loyalty. Theoretically, our findings further insight into CBE’s virtual communitybased dynamics, with a focus on the role of community identification and reward. Practically, our results identify the key role of nurturing virtual community identification and the offering of reward to engage consumers.

Introduction

According to the Global Web Index Report (2018), today’s increasingly tech-savvy consumers spend in excess of two hours daily on social media, which comprises around 33% of their online time. Given the considerable amount of time people spend online nowadays, marketers are making substantial investments in this area (Lee et al., 2018; Mirbagheri and Najmi, 2019). The Web 2.0 (and beyond) environment is characterized by two-way interactions between consumers and brands, thereby exhibiting a stark contrast with more one-way, traditional media (Hollebeek et al., 2014; Brodie et al., 2013). In this interactive environment, consumers are not only able to respond to brand-related communications, but also create these themselves (e.g. user-generated content; Hollebeek and Macky, 2019), revealing its high degree of interactivity. In this changing environment, consumer brand engagement, which reveals the consumer’s investment in their brand-related interactions (Islam et al., 2017; Hollebeek et al., 2019b), is of rapidly growing importance (Wirtz et al., 2013; Islam and Rahman, 2017). Specifically, engaged customers have been viewed to contribute to sales increases, enhanced positive word-of-mouth, and improved organizational performance (Bijmolt et al., 2010), thus warranting its strategic significance.