Impact of Advertisement Informativeness and eWOM on Brand Advocacy: Self-Brand Connection as a Mediator

Advancements in social media technologies have empowered consumers with instant information about anything they wish for. The implications of such power are quite profound on brands, as any word circulating on social media about them can make or break within no time. Brand advocacy can be a ray of hope for brands in helping to set some direction favorable to their image. To understand how brand advocacy works and how consumers convert into brand advocates, it is very important first to understand how relationships between brands and consumers are formed. Nothing better than the concept of self-brand connection explains how a sustainable relationship is formed between brands and consumers.  However, how self-brand connection itself is formed and how it leads to brand advocacy is poorly understood in the literature. Informative advertising and electronic word of mouth are among the ways through which self-brand connection is formed. Scant attention has been given in the literature on the relationship of electronic word of mouth with self-brand connection, even if electronic word of mouth today is seen as shaping consumer decisions. More importantly, the negligible attention of scholars has gone on to establish the mediational role of self-brand connection in relationships between advertisement informativeness and, electronic word of mouth and brand advocacy. This study thus provides a two-fold contribution to the literature by not only examining the relationship of electronic word of mouth with self-brand connection alongside advertisement informativeness. But also uncovers mediation of self-brand connection in relationships of advertisement informativeness and electronic word of mouth with brand advocacy. The population for this study was car owners of all auto brands plying in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. A snowball sampling method was employed, through which 338 responses from car owners were collected from two regions of Saudi Arabia. Structural equation modeling was used to test all hypotheses of the study simultaneously. Results of the study reported that both advertisement informativeness and electronic word of mouth exhibited a statistically significant positive relationship with the self-brand connection. Self-brand connection was also reported to exhibit a significant positive relationship with brand advocacy in this study. Self-brand connection is fully mediated in both relationships of advertisement informativeness and electronic word of mouth with brand advocacy. The key to converting consumers into brand advocates and sustainable enjoyment of growing market share lies in the understanding of the self-brand connection. However, to achieve a self-brand connection, both advertisement informativeness and favorable electronic word of mouth are indispensable. Future research directions and some limitations are also outlined in this study.