Brand tracking on social media: The role of country-of-origin perceptions

Abstract

Marketers are now almost a decade into using social media as another outlet in developing brand relationships with consumers. Yet an understanding of how consumers interact with brands online is still in its infancy. This paper compares the social media and brand-tracking habits of consumers in three parts of the world: Asia, the Middle East and the USA. In addition, the study attempts to explain what motivates consumers to follow brands on social media, focusing on the role of products’ country of origin in explaining the relationship. The results show that US consumers spent the most time on social media and tracked the most brands, while Thai respondents did the least of both. Four dimensions of social media brand tracking were identified and ratings compared across groups. Significant differences among groups were found for one of the four factors, ‘brand experience’, with US consumers experiencing significantly more positive ‘brand experiences’ than Thai consumers, and Egyptian consumers falling somewhere in between. The results also indicate that the country of product origin can have some effects on brand tracking.