Abstract

Branded content marketing serves as an ongoing conversation between brands and consumers. Creating value-rich information that breaks through the noise and that can accelerate brand building has been a standing challenge for many brands. Informed by extant literature on content marketing, this study proposed a comprehensive theoretical framework that explicates the mechanism of branded content marketing in brand loyalty across both high- and low-product involvement brands. This study applied the classification of consumption values to the context of content marketing, hypothesized, and identified consumers’ experiential evaluation as an underlying mechanism of content marketing accounting for brand loyalty. Specifically, for a high-product involvement brand (i.e., Lenovo), consumers’ perceived informative and entertainment value of branded content, as well as the perceived functional value of the brand’s YouTube channel, positively shape their experiential evaluation of the brand, which in turn, leads to greater brand loyalty. For a low-product involvement brand (i.e., Nescafé), consumers’ derived entertainment and social value of branded content, as well as the functional value of its YouTube channel, jointly affect consumers’ experiential evaluation, which subsequently contributes to elevated brand loyalty.

摘要

品牌内容营销是品牌与消费者之间持续不断的对话。对于许多品牌而言，创造突破噪音并能加速品牌建设的有价值的信息一直是一项长期的挑战。在有关内容营销的现有文献的指导下，本研究提出了一个综合的理论框架，该框架阐明了涉及高和低产品参与度品牌的品牌内容营销在品牌忠诚度方面的机制。这项研究将消费价值的分类应用于内容营销的背景下，进行了假设，并将消费者的体验评估确定为内容营销对品牌忠诚度进行会计处理的基本机制。具体来说，对于具有较高产品参与度的品牌（例如，联想），消费者对品牌内容的知情和娱乐价值以及品牌YouTube频道的感知功能价值，对他们对品牌的体验评价产生了积极的影响，进而提高了品牌忠诚度。对于低产品参与度的品牌（即Nescafé），消费者获得的品牌内容娱乐性和社会价值以及其YouTube频道的功能价值共同影响着消费者的体验评估，从而有助于提高品牌忠诚度。