Brand Relationship and Engagement

Social media platforms provide an endless list of options in terms of brand offers. Consumers who previously had limited access to marketing offerings and information, or were unaccustomed to looking beyond their physical reach, have learned to access products, services and brands both locally and globally given the borderless nature of digital environments (Buesing et al., 2024). These advances, though beneficial for consumers, make it more crucial for companies to deliver seamless experiences to draw consumers away from general brand listings or content timelines to their online brand communities (OBCs), where a specific brand is the central focus of the online environment. Many major brands have their own social media pages through which they reinvent themselves by delivering real-time, simple and effective personalised experiences. For instance, Sony’s PlayStation® retained its large following on X (formerly Twitter) by continuously posting content of new game trailers, gaming footage, streaming events and free games to download. Netflix fosters its subscribers’ engagement and sense of community with a variety of online platforms with content that motivates user engagement and interactions, such as behind-the-scenes content, celebrity-featured and celebrity-endorsed posts, and various content formats featuring their films and shows. The social media strategy of online fashion retailer Cider clothing has been a major contributor to their continued success in targeting and engaging young audiences, particularly through their TikTok and influencer and ambassador marketing strategies. The personal care brand Dove has generated impactful marketing campaigns through its OBCs that have reinvented its image and presence in the market. Dove’s ‘Real Beauty’ campaign, first launched in 2004, has been refreshed multiple times. It resurfaced in 2020 as ‘Courage is Beautiful’ to honour healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic (Neff, 2020); the core message of the campaign was to focus on the beauty of real human values. Likewise, in 2024, Dove issued the campaign ‘The Code’, which highlighted the brand’s commitment to representing women in advertisements without using artificial intelligence (Tovar, 2024). Such activity aligns with arguments related to the need of having brand pages or OBCs; brands can use OBCs to generate and post brand-related content and messages, facilitate real-time brand–customer or customer–customer interactions, manage customer relationships as well as build the online follower population.