Digital Content Marketing's Role in Fostering Consumer Engagement, Trust, and Value: Framework, Fundamental Propositions, and Implications

By Linda D. Hollebeek, K. Macky. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 2019

892 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In a landscape of growing online consumer/firm interactions, digital content marketing (DCM) which aims to foster consumers’ brand engagement and trust, is on the rise. However, despite significant practitioner interest, academic DCM research is lagging, resulting in an important knowledge gap. Based on an extensive review, we conceptualize DCM as the creation and dissemination of relevant, valuable brand-related content to current or prospective customers on digital platforms to develop their favorable brand engagement, trust, and relationships (vs. directly persuading consumers to purchase). We also develop a conceptual framework that identifies important consumer-based DCM antecedents, including uses-and-gratifications (U&G)-informed functional, hedonic, and authenticity-based motives for DCM interactions. DCM's first-tier, intra-interaction consequences include consumers’ cognitive, emotional, and behavioral engagement that foster brand-related sense-making, identification, and citizenship behaviors, respectively. These in turn trigger DCM's second-tier, extra-interaction consequences of brand trust and attitude, which successively contribute to the development of DCM's third-tier, value-based consequences of consumer and firm-based brand equity. We summarize our findings in a set of Fundamental Propositions (FPs) of DCM and conclude by deriving key implications from our analyses.

Subfields: Information Systems and Management, Marketing, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2c182daab7b5d1ca0e06531f9718ec9d42945d6a

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Citations in the corpus

How stories generate consumer engagement: An exploratory study (2019, background): “To understand how CE generates benefits for brands, recent focus has been placed on how specific brand contents work to create engagement (Kim et al., 2016; Schultz, 2017; Lee et al., 2018; Hollebeek & Macky, 2019).”
Expanding customer engagement: the role of negative engagement, dual valences and contexts (2020, background): “Further, it addresses the co-existence of positive and negative engagement within two types of service relationships (Hollebeek and Macky, 2019).”
Setting the future of digital and social media marketing research: Perspectives and research propositions (2020, background): “For instance, Hollebeek and Macky (2019) suggest that consumer engagement in the DCM context includes elements of multi-tier interaction between the brand and its consumers.”
Digital content marketing as a catalyst for e-WOM in food tourism (2020, methodology): “However, since entering the era of the mobile Internet, DCM has tended to interact with users of mobile social media or mobile applications through video, live streaming, and long-form content to achieve the purpose of disseminating content (Hollebeek and Macky, 2019).”