The value of brand community: The impact of brand community on company revenues and the role of customer engagement value and rivalry

Brand communities have become an everyday part of many consumers’ lives. They have been credited as playing a considerable role in the impressive growth of numerous brands from a range of diverse industries. However, the extant research has not fully explored the impact that brand community membership has upon a consumer’s direct engagement with the brand or the downstream effect brand community has upon company revenues. This situation is exacerbated further by the lack of research into the potential boundary conditions associated with brand community. Utilising a longitudinal research design, this thesis has been able to support the conceptualisation that brand community is a driver of customer engagement value and is also positively related to company revenues. Firstly, aided by S-D logic, the study presents empirical evidence of brand community identification as causal driver of customer engagement value. Secondly, brand community identification is presented as a driver of both primary revenues, those derived from the primary product offered by a brand, and cross-buying revenues, those obtained through consumers purchasing across secondary product offerings. Furthermore, customer engagement value has been shown to mediate brand community identification’s impact upon primary revenues. However, the mediating effect is not present within the relationship between brand community identification and cross-buying revenues. Finally, rivalry was shown to have a moderating effect within the relationship between brand community identification and customer engagement value. This thesis builds upon the extant literature and provides greater managerial guidance on the importance of brand community in the development of customer engagement value, company revenues and how rivalry can be utilised to drive higher levels of customer engagement value.