Digital Marketing and Consumer Engagement: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications

The interactive nature of social networking sites contributes to reinforce engagement between consumers and brands in terms of co-creation of shared values. According to Hollebeek (2011), consumer-brand engagement (CBE) implies cognitive, emotional, behavioral factors, which connect a brand with its followers. This chapter will show three successful Twitter strategies from three different brands, using a methodological approach focusing on the relational conditions that turn a brand into an engaging player on Twitter. Interviews with brand communication managers and followers were conducted. Moreover, initiatives were explored through the stream of tweets produced around the brands; pragmatic, semantic, syntactic and structural features of tweets were considered. Results show that, while the three initiatives considered here lean on a cognitive-based CBE, a full engagement in the/a brand’s world is needed to build a long-lasting and successful relationship between brand and consumer, in order to co-construct a future shared reality.