How Societal and Individual Diversity Affect Brand Equity of High Versus Low Involvement Products

The popularity of social media across the world provides a modern communication platform as well as facilitates new virtual places for online communities where buyers talk about the brand and thus experience customer value. Customer perceived ethicality is gaining importance because buyers are highly concerned about the ethical performance of a company. So the primary aim of the present research is to explore how culture, personality, and motivation influence customer value such as social and content value which one after the other along with customer perceived ethicality affect brand equity and its dimensions of high versus low involvement products on social media based communities setting. The data is gathered from 600 community members of social media in Karachi and analysis is performed through the SmartPLS software. The results of the current investigation indicate that in the environment of social media-based communities extrinsic, extroversion, and collectivism characteristics of buyers represent social value whereas, intrinsic, introversion, and individualism qualities of buyers show content value. Then both customer value and customer perceived ethicality successfully influence the target variables i.e. brand equity and its all dimensions under study. Interestingly, the impact of customer-perceived ethicality is stronger for high-involvement products. On the other hand, the impact of both customer value for instance social and content value is stronger for low-involvement products. Thus, companies should convince buyers to keep on participating in social media and provide an environment that supports diversification to strengthen brand equity and its dimensions under study.