Mobile social commerce: The booster for brand loyalty?
Introduction
Social commerce has recently gained popularity among businesses and transformed the traditional manners of conducting electronic commerce (e-commerce) and marketing (Turban, Bolloju, & Liang, 2010). The rising of social media is the cornerstone in conducting social commerce (Gamboa & Gonçalves, 2014). Over the last decade, social media has redefined the living styles of individuals and business activities of organizations (Ngai, Moon, Lam, Chin, & Tao, 2015). Some social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, have been transformed into mobile application (Lin & Lu, 2015) in this mobile digital age. It is also learnt that 79% of the Fortune 100 Best Companies use social media and 54% have a Facebook fan page (Gamboa & Gonçalves, 2014). Businesses, especially small and medium enterprises, opined that Facebook is a platform for interaction with their customers, as well as a marketing tool (Chen, Papazafeiropoulou, Chen, Duan, & Liu, 2014). As a matter of fact, both mobile commerce and e-commerce have been fuelled by social networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkeIn (Lin & Lu, 2015). Social media allows businesses to interact with millions of customers at the same time, and businesses need not to invest a fortune for using social media (Gamboa & Gonçalves, 2014).
Adding to the above, even brick and mortar firms have increased the use of social media in brand communication, product promotion, and customer relationship management (Zhang, Lu, Gupta, & Zhao, 2014). Corporate giants, for instance, Dell and Starbucks have recognized social media as a sales booster (Turban et al., 2010). As noticed by Chua and Banerjee (2013), both Dell and Starbucks have embraced social media in their operations. The international coffee house chain, Starbucks has employed a number of social media services. Other than the well-known Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Starbucks is also hosting a discussion forum called MyStarbucksIdea, which serves as a corporate discussion forum that allows customers to discuss organization related issues.
Despite that social commerce is a hot topic, it is currently a sparsely researched area (Zhang et al., 2014), not to mention social commerce under mobile environment. Besides, it is worth to study consumer behaviour in the area of mobile social media, in addition to the effects brought by social media to businesses in Asian context (Lee & Phang, 2015). Moreover, “are customers really empowered by social media?” Turban et al. (2010, p.39) raised this interesting issue, which signifies that further investigation needs to be done. Lee and Phang (2015) further emphasized the need to access the inhibitor role played by privacy concern on social media use among Asians.
Recently, Casaló, Cisneros, Flavián, and Guinalíu (2009) discovered that a customer's participation in online social network could indirectly establish customer loyalty. This embarks the motive to study if mobile social commerce continuance usage could influence brand loyalty among customers. To shed light on the current unilluminated parts of literature, this study conceptualizes a model that based upon the Expectation Confirmation Model (ECM) by Bhattacherjee (2001) to comprehend mobile social commerce continuance usage under the Asian context, and has a twofold objective. The proposed framework seeks to examine if consumer brand loyalty is influenced by mobile social commerce continuance usage and post-usage satisfaction, so to understand the impacts delivered by mobile social media to businesses. Besides, the conceptual framework tries to integrate privacy concern into ECM, in order to apprehend its effects on mobile social commerce continuance usage. In view of the current literature, these integrations are considered as pioneer acts in the field.
Section snippets
Mobile social media
Social media, has been referred by Chua and Banerjee (2013, p.239) as “a collection of online services that supports social interactions among users and allows them to co-create, find, share and evaluate the online information repository”. Rauniar, Rawski, Yang, and Johnson (2014) classified social media into few categories, namely blogs (LiveJournal), communities (YouTube), collaborative projects (Wikipedia), social networking sites (Facebook), virtual game worlds (World of Warcraft), and
Hypotheses development
Under the premise of ECM, Bhattacherjee (2001) posited that information systems continuance intention is mainly affected by satisfaction that resulted from prior usage, while satisfaction is predicted by users' confirmation of expectation and perceived usefulness after usage. Besides satisfaction, perceived usefulness also has the ability to drive continuance intention during post-acceptance stage, and it is influenced by confirmation as well.
Thong et al. (2006) opined that if users have
Data collection and sampling technique
This study has a target population of mobile social commerce users, as they are experienced and able to provide relevant insights. Self-administered questionnaire survey was distributed in a large and well known shopping mall in Selangor that specializes in IT products. The choice of Selangor state as the sampling location is due to its highest percentage of mobile users as compared to other states in Malaysia and relatively high mobile penetration rate (Malaysian Communications and Multimedia
Demographic profiles
Table 2 shows all the demographic variables for this study. Majority of the respondents are male and from the age group of 20–24. It is also reported that respondents with “Bachelor Degree/Professional Qualifications” occupy a major percentage in the sample. Besides, quite a number of them are privately employed and the monthly income of these respondents are mainly below RM 5000. Lastly, a great number of them have more than five years' experience in mobile social media use and 90.4% of them
Discussion
Fundamentally, all the paths (H1 to H5) in the baseline model of ECM have been reconfirmed in this study. If users are able to confirm their initial expectation on mobile social commerce, they will then perceive mobile social commerce as a useful platform and satisfied with it. The perceived usefulness on mobile social commerce later on affects satisfaction on usage in a positive manner and drives the continuance intention. Besides, satisfaction on usage has a significant role in developing
Theoretical implications
Considering the status quo of literature, this study has made several contributions. With the aim of expanding current literature on mobile social media, understanding the role of privacy concern, and comprehending the significance of mobile social media to businesses, this study proposes two integrations into the ECM framework, namely CFSMIP and brand loyalty. The unforeseen roles of CFSMIP on perceived usefulness and continuance intention are deemed to have contributed new philosophy to the
Limitations and recommendations
In view of the sampling method employed and sample size, the sample of this study might not be representative of the population, therefore caution should be practiced in generalizing the results of this study. Future studies can consider employing quota sampling and go for larger sample size. Besides, this study successfully incorporated brand loyalty into the ECM framework; however its variance explained by continuance intention and satisfaction is relatively low in the research model. This
Conclusion
On the whole, this study proposes two integrations, namely CFSMIP and brand loyalty, into the ECM framework; and the proposed model is tested empirically. The effects of CFSMIP were quite surprising, as the results differed from the expected outcome that is of the past literature. Instead of having direct effect on continuance intention, CFSMIP was found to have an indirect effect on continuance intention, through perceived usefulness. Moreover, it was also learnt that CFSMIP affects perceived
Acknowledgements
This study was substantially supported by UTAR RPS from Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman, under the Account No. 6251/L08.
Jun-Jie Hew is a tutor in Faculty of Business and Finance, Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR), Perak, Malaysia. He is also an M.phil scholar in the same university currently. His research areas include information technology adoption and continuance. Email: [email protected]
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Jun-Jie Hew is a tutor in Faculty of Business and Finance, Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR), Perak, Malaysia. He is also an M.phil scholar in the same university currently. His research areas include information technology adoption and continuance. Email: [email protected]
Voon-Hsien Lee is a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Business and Finance, Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman, Malaysia. She received both her Bachelor and Master's degrees in Accounting from Monash University. She is currently pursuing her PhD in the area of Total Quality Management (TQM) in Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman, Malaysia. Her current research interests include TQM, information technology adoption, human resource management, and organizational learning. Email: [email protected]
Keng-Boon Ooi is a Professor at the Faculty of Business & Information Science, UCSI University, Malaysia. He has published over 90 articles in international refereed journals. Email: [email protected]
Binshan Lin is the BellSouth Corporation Professor at Louisiana State University in Shreveport. He received his PhD from the Louisiana State University. He is a nine-time recipient of the Outstanding Faculty Award at LSUS. He has published over 270 papers in refereed journals. Email: [email protected]