E Consumer Conformity and its Impact on the Brand Engagement

Abstract

The rise of Internet technology has change the paradigm of consumer behavior to get engaged with their favorite Brands. Consumers are more actively using virtual communities over the social media to interact with different consumers around the globe. Consumers are intended to fit in with the virtual groups of these communities and this intent of consumers make them get conform to group members. Consumers conform to normative and informative aspects of their virtual communities and this conformity behavior of consumers over the Social media virtual communities influences the engagement nature of consumers toward their Brands in the market. The conformity behavior of consumers who discuss about their brands which influence their engagement for Brands is studied with the help of Apparel Brands in this research. The semi-structured questionnaire distributed online with the help of Google Form link. There are 346 responses considering for the study after distributing questionnaire to 1600 respondents. PLS-SEM and Process Macro tools are used to analyse the data. The results indicate the significant impact of E-Consumer Conformity on Brand Engagement. There is some mediation effects are also found among the variables included in the study. Demographics act a strong mediator between Normative Consumer Conformity and Brand Engagement as well as Informative Consumer Conformity. newline