Does “Liking” Lead to Loving? The Impact of Joining a Brand's Social Network on Marketing Outcomes

By Leslie K. John, Oliver Emrich, Sunil Gupta, Michael I. Norton. 2017

160 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Does “liking” a brand on Facebook cause a person to view it more favorably? Or is “liking” simply a symptom of being fond of a brand? The authors disentangle these possibilities and find evidence for the latter: brand attitudes and purchasing are predicted by consumers' preexisting fondness for brands, and these are the same regardless of when and whether consumers “like” brands on social media. In addition, we explore possible second-order effects by examining whether “liking” brands might cause consumers' friends to view that brand more favorably. When consumers see that a friend has “liked” a brand, they are less likely to buy the brand relative to when they learn that a friend genuinely likes the brand in the offline sense, which is a more meaningful social endorsement. Taken together, five experiments and two meta-analyses (N > 14,000) suggest that turning “liking” into improved brand attitudes and increased purchasing by consumers and their friends may require more than just the click of a button.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Marketing, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/614c6deeca711f2e603256dc876b86fe37064560

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Citations in the corpus

When Posting About Products on Social Media Backfires: The Negative Effects of Consumer Identity Signaling on Product Interest (2019, methodology): “Our research complements the nascent body of research that instead focuses on individual-level consequences such as brand favorability and purchase (John et al. 2017), self-esteem and self-control (Wilcox and Stephen 2013), and shopping (Zhang et al. 2017).”
The future of social media in marketing (2019, background): “However, putting high valuations on mere online exposures or collecting Blikes^ for specific posts can be somewhat speculative, as academic research shows that acquiring Blikes^ on social media might have no effect on consumers’ attitudes or behaviors (John et al. 2017; Mochon et al. 2017).”
Can Social Media Marketing Improve Customer Relationship Capabilities and Firm Performance? Dynamic Capability Perspective (2017, background): “However, research suggests that “likes” of brand social media pages may be too weak a signal of future engagement behavior for the brand because it takes mere seconds of attention (John et al. 2016).”
Don't Just “Like” Me, Promote Me: How Attachment and Attitude Influence Brand Related Behaviors on Social Media (2018, background): “These findings bring to the forefront an important question: what drives meaningful social media behaviors? Although consumers can display token behaviors for causes or brands by “liking” them, this does not necessarily lead to more meaningful behaviors in the future, including ultimately, purchase ”