The relationship between motivations to engage online with a brand and consumers online brand-related activities and the moderating role of privacy concerns

Abstract

Brand pages on SNS are fundamental for companies, offering a range of extraordinary opportunities to interact and communicate with consumers. The need to understand consumer engagement behaviour in SNS, led to the examination of the motivations for using or not using SNS. Still, the relationship between specific intrinsic motivations to engage online with a brand through activities such as consuming, contributing or creating brand related content have not received the attention and examination they require. Through an online survey quantitative data was obtained measuring the intensity of Facebook users’ intrinsic motivations to engage in Facebook brand pages and the frequency of consumers’ online brand-related activities, namely consuming, contributing and creating. Then, through a regression analysis it was examined whether there are positive and significant relationships between selected motivations and behavioural activities. Finally, the moderating effect of privacy concerns on the frequency of consumers’ online brand-related activities was explored through a one-way anova test. The results of the study show that there is sufficient evidence to conclude there is a significant relationship between motivations and brand-related activities as all correlation coefficients are significantly different from zero. Still, some correlations are stronger, others are weaker. The expected moderator effect of privacy concerns affecting the relationship between all motivations and COBRA dimensions was not confirmed as all tests showed the moderation effect to be not statistically significant. Privacy concerns do not cause an amplifying or weakening effect between intrinsic motivations to engage and the frequency of consumption, contribution and creation of brand-related content.

Date of Award	27 Jan 2020
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Daniela Langaro (Supervisor)