Something social, something entertaining? How digital content marketing augments consumer experience and brand loyalty

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.