The Research Journal of the Costume Culture (복식문화연구)

The Costume Culture Association (복식문화학회)
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Factors affecting the development of consumer-brand relationships - The role of parasocial interaction -

SNS 브랜드 페이지에서 소비자-브랜드 관계 형성에 미치는 영향 요인 분석 - 준사회적 상호작용 역할을 중심으로 -

  • Park, Jee-Sun (Dept. of Fashion Industry, Incheon National University) ;
  • Ha, Sejin (Dept. of Retail Hospitality and Tourism Management, The University of Tennessee)
  • Received : 2016.11.30
  • Accepted : 2016.12.31
  • Published : 2017.02.28
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Abstract

The rapid growth in the popularity of social media sites has meant that social media has become an important communication channel for brands. Brands create brand pages on social media to cultivate positive and strong relationships with consumers. This study seeks to enhance our understanding of how fashion brand pages in social media foster consumer-brand relationships by exploring the factors that affect the development of consumer-brand relationships. Drawing on the parasocial interaction theory, this study proposes parasocial interaction as a key factor of this process. Specifically, this study proposes four antecedents (vividness, interactivity, social presence, and focused attention) of consumers' parasocial interaction with brand pages, which further affects consumer responses in terms of affective engagement and brand loyalty. An online survey was administered with consumers who have followed and visited at least one fashion brand page via a social networking site (SNS). Structural equation modeling revealed that consumers' perceptions of vividness, interactivity, social presence, and focused attention on a fashion brand page positively affected their feelings towards parasocial interaction with the brand page, which in turn led to their affective engagement with the brand page and consequent brand loyalty. These findings suggest that consumers build relationships of varying degrees with brand pages in a similar manner to that with people, which leads to their development of a positive relationship with the brand. This study concludes with discussions and practical implications.

Keywords

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