The Effect of Brand Heritage on Social Commerce Site Privacy Risk, Brand Equity, and Brand Advocacy

The Effect Of Brand Heritage On Social Commerce Site Privacy Risk, Brand Equity, And Brand Advocacy

Social commerce is a new business model that has added commercial features to the regular Web 2.0 tools and social media pages; consumers can now have social and commercial interactions (Pham et al., 2023). More precisely, social commerce applies social media tools to create a business. Notably, many social media sites and online communities have started to engage in e-commerce business instead of relying solely on online ads (P. Wang et al., 2023). In addition, they have added shopping tools to their websites, such as the buying button on Facebook (Chen et al., 2018). Therefore, it is found that social commerce exists in two main types: an e-commerce website that allows users to interact and share information or a social media site with promotional and transactional features (Chiu et al., 2023). It is also worth mentioning that social commerce differs from e-commerce in that it has four layers: commerce, users, transformation among them, and communities. In contrast, e-commerce has only two: commerce and users (Tseng, 2023). Thus, social commerce is considered an advanced form of e-commerce that allows users to engage in selling products in the online marketplace (Pham et al., 2023).

Social commerce research is growing and has been examined in various disciplines, especially in social sciences. The literature shows that social commerce-based consumer behavior has captured researchers’ attention in many contexts, such as consumer decision making, consumer purchase intention, consumer purchase behavior, and consumer engagement (Chiu et al., 2023; Cuomo et al., 2020; P. Wang et al., 2023; P. Wang & Qian, 2023). Conversely, brand-related research has been limited to issues concerning brand equity (Pham et al., 2023), brand loyalty (Zhang et al., 2016), and brand engagement (Bazi et al., 2020). Brand heritage is one of the branding concepts that has been gaining considerable attention over the years, but very little is understood about the role of brand heritage in the context of social commerce. This research contributes to the brand heritage literature by adopting the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) model to explore the influence of brand heritage of social commerce sites on consumers’ privacy risk and how the latter affects brand equity and brand advocacy as shown in Figure 1.

The methodology of this study was based on a quantitative approach for data collection and analysis. The study targeted Amazon website users in the United States, and online surveys were employed to collect their responses. The findings of this study are useful to the managers of social commerce sites as they expand their knowledge about brand heritage and how it would lessen consumers’ privacy risk and improve the brand equity and brand advocacy of their companies. The remainder of this research is organized into four sections: Section 2 reviews the literature and introduces the research hypotheses. Section 3 explains the research methodology. Section 4 contains the analysis methods and results. Section 5 discusses the findings and illustrates the study’s theoretical and practical implications as well as its limitations and future research recommendations.