The Impact of Brand Social Values and Brand Cognitive Values to Brand Recommended Intention with Brand Characteristric as Mediating Variable

Abstract

Purpose: This study examines the kind of community value companies should provide when strengthening the relationship between customers and brands through the establishment of an online brand community, and how this kind of community value promotes customers’ sense of community engagement and willingness to spread brand reputation. The paper also discusses how an enterprise’s brand symbolism affects the relationship between community value and customers’ engagement in online brand community. This study explored the important role of brand symbolism in the establishment of an online brand community.

Design/methodology/approach: This study uses data collection from questionnaire surveys to design a quantitative research method. An online questionnaire survey of mobile phone users in East Java was conducted to collect data on social value, cognitive value, brand symbolism, customer community engagement, and brand recommendation. The brands of mobile phone include Apple, Huawei, Samsung, OPPO, VIVO, and MI  Randomly selected 240 subjects from their sample database and then sent the questionnaire link to research participants’ mobile phones. For the model analysis and hypotheses test-ing, the researcher used statistical software IBM SPSS Statistics and AMOS 21.

Findings: First, online brand community value (both cognitive and social value) has a pos-itive impact on customer community engagement. Second, customer communi-ty engagement has a positive impact on customers’ brand recommend intention. Third, the customer community engagement is a mediator between the online brand community value and the customer brand recommend intention. Most importantly, fourth, the symbolic value of the brand controls the relationship between community value and customer community engagement. For brands with high symbolic value, the community value should emphasize cognitive val-ue rather than social value. For brands with a low symbolic value, the communi-ty provides cognitive or social value, which is not affected by the symbolism of the brand.

Research limitations/implications: Among the 240 research participants, the researcher ex-cluded participants who lacked online brand community experience or had in-valid data to qualify for data collection. After the researcher excluded participants who did not qualify for data collection, only 203 qualified questionnaire surveys advanced to the data collection and analysis phase, which was the ques-tionnaire recovery rate of 84.58%.

Originality/value: This paper is original

Paper type: Research paper