Return on engagement : exploring its proposed antecedents, its impact on repurchase intention, and the moderation of involvement

Abstract

Every now and then, powerful consumer trends emerge. Companies have no other choice but to familiarize and adapt to the most powerful ones. Online social media are one of these trends, as it has revolutionized the way humans interact with each other. Only in the last decade, we have witnessed major upheavals. Facebook.com, which is today by far the world´s largest social media platform, was the first social media that was accepted and used by a large set of the population. Witnessing this trend, customer engagement is more important now than ever before. Consumer engagement is a field where a lot of research has been done. Hence, return on engagement, which can be said to be what you as a company get back from engaging with your customers, is a field where research is lacking. With this I wish to fill a gap in the consumer engagement literature. As such, the core of this master thesis is to explore and empirically test how trust, perceived risk, and prior experiences with a company ultimately affect consumer´s return on engagement. Further, it investigates consumers repurchase intentions in terms of the links that companies are posting on Facebook. In other words, this thesis is investigating how companies can successfully connect with their customers for long-term profitability. All of the variables included in the model are operationalized through multiple indicators. They are measured through a cumulative approach meaning the customer´s total experiences and perceptions with and of companies while being logged onto Facebook. Finally, category involvement is investigated as a potential source that can cause the relationship to change. To gather data I created a survey based on previous established and validated scales, which were adjusted for the purpose. The surveys were distributed online, mostly through Facebook, to reach the right kind of respondents to include in the study. The results points to several interesting findings, and generally prove areas worthy of further investigations.