Back Issues 11-20

THE EFFECT OF CONSUMER ENGEGEMENT IN ONLINE BRAND COMMUNITY ON PURCHASE INTENTION-THE CASE STUDY OF NEWLY LAUNCHED COSMETIC PRODUCTS

Hsing-Yu Chen

EMBA Program, College of Management, Fu Jen Catholic University, Taiwan, R.O.C. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 

Kai-Ping Huang*

Department of Business Administration, MBA Program in International Management,

Fu Jen Catholic University, Taiwan, R.O.C. 

*Corresponding Author: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the cosmetics industry; when consumers want to buy newly launched cosmetic products, they cannot go to brick-and-mortar stores to try them. The cosmetics industry must rethink how to reach consumers. Marketers are bound to follow trends to grasp changes in consumer behavior and attitudes and change traditional marketing strategies. Nowadays, social media can help products and online shopping consumer groups to add more diverse connections, and it has become a mainstream platform for communication and information transmission on the Internet. Therefore, many firms have created online brand communities, providing them with opportunities to build further relationships with consumers and promote their businesses and products. Although online brand communities have gained increasing attention over the decade of social media, few studies have investigated the impact of consumer engagement in online brand communities on purchase intentions for newly launched products. Therefore, this study addresses the above problems and proposes a framework that empirically examines consumer engagement in online brand communities for like-minded discussion and up-to-date information, influencing brand awareness, brand attitudes, and purchase intention. This study utilizes a quantitative empirical method, with office ladies in Taiwan as the primary research subjects, and a total of 305 valid questionnaires are collected. 

The empirical studies were analyzed using SPSS 26 and AMOS 24. The survey results supported all the hypotheses proposed in this study. The findings further guide brand managers and marketers in the cosmetics industry to use social media through online brand community engagement strategies to increase consumer purchase intention for newly launched cosmetic products. 

Keywords: Consumer engagement, online brand community, brand awareness, brand attitude, purchase intention.