Understanding brand loyalty formation through emotional engagement: evidence from social media marketing in Thailand
Issarapong PoltaneePurpose
This study examines how emotional engagement, customisation, entertainment, interaction, trendiness and electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) combine to shape brand loyalty among Thai luxury-brand consumers exposed to high-intensity social-commerce environments. The study is framed by the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) model and the commitment-trust theory of relationship marketing, and interpreted through a complexity-theoretic lens.
Design/methodology/approach
A dual-analytic design is adopted. Survey data from 400 digitally active luxury-brand consumers in the Bangkok Metropolitan Region, recruited via purposive convenience sampling with explicit screening for recent luxury-brand purchase and active social-media following, were analysed using integrated generalised structured component analysis (IGSCA) for symmetrical paths and necessary condition analysis (NCA) and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) for asymmetrical logic.
Findings
Emotional engagement is the strongest symmetrical driver of brand loyalty (beta = 0.592), followed by eWOM (beta = 0.264). The NCA evidence is more cautious than previously claimed: effect sizes are small to moderate (d = 0.090–0.234), so interaction and trendiness are better read as baseline enablers of loyalty than as strict necessary conditions. The fsQCA recovers four equifinal sufficient configurations; the recipe combining high emotional engagement with customisation and entertainment offers the clearest route to loyalty.
Research limitations/implications
Findings are bounded by four conditions: a youthful sample (82.2% aged 18–25), exclusive focus on the Bangkok Metropolitan Region, a cross-sectional survey design and a one-dimensional operationalisation of emotional engagement. These bound generalisability to older Thai consumers, non-urban respondents, longitudinal trust-commitment sequences and tri-dimensional engagement constructs. Future work should pursue panel data, replication in less collectivist Asian markets such as Japan and South Korea, bootstrapped truth tables and cross-platform comparisons (TikTok versus Instagram versus LINE).
Practical implications
Luxury-brand managers should concentrate differentiating creative investment on emotional-engagement content – storytelling, ritualised brand experiences and personalised narratives. Interaction and trendiness should be maintained as baseline conditions rather than over-funded relative to affective content. Tactics should be platform-aware: TikTok and LINE-VOOM reward the baseline-enabler layer, whereas Instagram and Facebook-Reels better support emotional engagement and customisation. The implications are framed as strategic priorities, not guaranteed revenue outcomes, given the cross-sectional and luxury-specific design.
Social implications
By clarifying which social-media-marketing elements actually translate into consumer loyalty, the study informs more accountable digital-marketing practice in emerging Asian social-commerce markets. The configurational logic discourages indiscriminate spend on every platform feature, encouraging brands to allocate resources where they create durable consumer relationships rather than transient engagement. The cultural reading of the Thai setting also alerts marketers and policymakers to the symbolic role of luxury consumption in collectivist societies, with implications for advertising ethics and digital-platform regulation.
Originality/value
The contribution is positioned as a methodologically integrative extension of existing social-media-marketing and loyalty research, rather than a wholly new theory of loyalty formation. By pairing S-O-R with commitment-trust theory and by grounding the necessary-versus-sufficient distinction in dual-factor logic, the study offers theoretical machinery for configurational reasoning that earlier single-method work could not supply.