Understanding Brand Love in Fashion Clothing Online Brand Communities: Moderating Role of Social Identity

Abstract

The study aimed to analyses the extraction of brand love in online network based societies and to advance an integrative conceptual framework in which sense of community, brand expression, self-expression influences brand love in clothing brand communities. The moderating role social identity in online setting is proposed. Therefore, self-administrative questionnaires was designed and 230 females participated from different brand communities’ pages. The results indicated that sense of community, brand expression, self-expression have relationship with Brand love. However, under moderating role of social identity the key variable was self-expression because Consumer involvement enhances brand love in online setting and followers want to build their social identity among their peers for presenting a loving gestures as a positive feeling. This also encourage the relationship between consumer-community and brand-community. The marketing managers of clothing brands should focus on social attributes of target customers for enhancing brand love.