The role of social media in the creation of brand experiences

The relationship between social media and brand experience remains unclear in spite of the strategic importance of social platforms in marketing. To narrow this gap of knowledge, this paper addresses three research objectives: first, defining what is brand experience on social media. Second, explaining how does brand experience come to life on social media? And, third, understanding how do social media create a brand experience. A set of propositions that comes from sense-making, marketing, and cognitive literature suggests that (a) brand experience on social media is the bundle of brand associations to attributes, emotions, or sensations that result from a sense-making process by which a consumer gives meaning to brand-related content consumption or creation on social media; (b) consumer encodes, stores, and retrieves brand experiences for declarative memory as brand associations to attributes, emotions, or sensations; (c) social media may trigger brand experience creation; however, these media may have challenging effects for brand experiences management (e.g., make difficult the creation of long-term brand experiences). Such a conceptual understanding of the role of social media at customer experience creation, paired with a set proposition for empirical work, provide a guide to future research into this field.