Abstract

Building consumers’ brand loyalty has always been of major importance for brands. Many previous studies have comprehensively studies how consumers’ brand loyalty is affected through brand satisfaction and brand trust from different perspectives. However, in the development of new technologies, social media gradually plays an important role in people’s daily life. In the same time, social media based brand community appeared corresponding to this development and a growing number of brands became alert to this change and began to use this platform to build their consumers’ brand loyalty. As a result, how brand satisfaction and brand trust would influence consumers’ brand loyalty nowadays in social media based brand communities became of great interest for marketers and companies. Moreover, social media based brand communities are beyond the limitation of national boundaries. And therefore if brands want to establish an effective marketing strategy to strengthen consumers’ brand loyalty through social media based brand communities in a global context, they should take culture into consideration. In the meantime, shopping experiences with a brand could have more impact than product features and product benefits and leaves a more memorable impression on consumers so that consumers with different levels of shopping experience may have different attitudes towards a brand in social media based brand communities. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to study and investigate how brand satisfaction and brand trust from a separate perspective would influence brand loyalty in social media based brand communities when considering the effects of cultural difference and consumers’ level of shopping experiences on brand loyalty in social media based brand communities so as to provide more comprehensive and profound suggestions for marketers to develop appropriate and efficient marketing strategies under targeted international marketing backgrounds.
Keywords: social media based brand community; brand satisfaction; brand trust; brand loyalty; shopping experience; cultural orientation.