Antecedents of consumer-brand engagement: The mediating role of brand satisfaction

Background: Customer management has evolved from transaction-based to customer engagement, emphasising the importance of establishing strong customer-brand relationships. To achieve consumer–brand engagement (CBE), nurturing connections and customer satisfaction are key. This study investigates CBE in two globally relevant brand contexts: services (social media) and products (smartphones). Aim: This study investigated how brand satisfaction mediates the relationships between consumer-based drivers, brand trust and self-expressive brands — as well as a firm-initiated driver, brand interactivity — and their influence on CBE. Setting: The study focused on South African smartphone owners and social media users. Method: A quantitative, cross-sectional, descriptive research design was followed. Data was collected from 503 smartphone owners and 491 social media users. Results: Structural equation modelling results for smartphones show that brand interactivity and self-expressive brand drive CBE reasoned behaviour. In the social media context, self-expressive brand drives CBE. Brand satisfaction is a mediator for both. It fully mediated the relationships between self-expressive brand and consumer-brand engagement affection, and brand interactivity and consumer-brand engagement affection, while partially mediating all other relationships. Conclusion: This study offers valuable insights into the importance of brand satisfaction within the CBE process, as it is the first to propose satisfaction as a mediator between key CBE drivers across two contexts. Contribution: Theoretically, the study contributes to S-D Logic to better understand the underlying mechanism of satisfaction in building relationships between consumers and brands. Practically, the findings highlight how key factors driving CBE are interconnected with satisfaction, which should be a central focus to enhance consumer engagement.