Online brand community engagement: Scale development and validation

Abstract

In a quest for connecting with customers, the world's largest brands have gone online to develop communities to interact with consumers. Despite widespread adoption less is known about what motivates consumers to continually interact in these communities. Across six studies, we develop and test a typology of online brand community engagement (i.e., the compelling intrinsic motivations to continue interacting with an online brand community). We identify 11 independent motivations and test the scale's predictive power for participation in an online brand community. This study provides a much needed refinement to the disparate conceptualizations and operationalizations of engagement in the literature. As a result, academic researchers can now rely on a diverse set of motivational measures that best fit the context of their research, adding to the versatility of future research studies. The results provide managers with new insight in the motivations for and impact of interacting in online brand communities.