Consumers’ engagement with brands online is increasingly important for marketers for both promotion of their brand’s message and sales. The purpose of this paper is to examine if consumers’ brand schematicity, a generalized consumer disposition to process information using brand schema, influenced their proclivity to engage with brands online through consuming and co-creating brand-related content, and the influence of online brand engagement on actual purchase of brands.
Two experiments were conducted to test the hypotheses.
Study 1 shows that brand schematicity increases online brand consumption and online brand co-creation and Study 2 shows that this online brand engagement is not always beneficial to brands in terms of sales. Specifically, because of resource depletion, consumers who co-create brand content online may purchase brands less while those that consume online brand content purchase more brands.
There is a lack of previous research addressing individual differences in consumers’ online brand engagement that this paper investigates. Further, a generalized, dispositional variable such as brand schematicity has not been hitherto investigated in the context of consumers’ online behavior. Finally, this paper shows counter-intuitive effects of online brand engagement on brand purchase.
