Title: Long live friendship? Relationships among friendship, trust and brand loyalty: a study of Starbucks

Authors: Yu-Chun Chung; Shu-Hsien Liao; Wen-Jung Chang

Addresses: Department of Food and Beverage Management, Jinwen University of Science and Technology, Taiwan ' Graduate School of Management Sciences, Tamkang University, Taiwan ' Department of Leisure Business Management, Hungkuo Delin University of Technology, Taiwan

Abstract: Undoubtedly, Facebook has become a rapidly emerging social media during recent decades. It has not only successfully expanded the traditional 'consumer-brand' relationship from the physical channels to the virtual ones, but also shaped complete interaction/communication model between corporate brand and consumers by aggressively build up its brand community. Though Starbucks has already been a well-known brand in Taiwan, few of social media studies has concerned with the influence of friendship and trust on fan's brand loyalty. In view of this, this study based on 340 valid fan samples from Starbuck's fan pages used structural equation modelling (SEM) to validate the research hypotheses. The empirical findings showed that friendship and trust both impact fans' brand loyalty to Starbucks while friendship also influenced trust. Besides, the moderated effect of consumer personality partially existed in our research model.

Keywords: friendship; trust; brand loyalty; Facebook fan pages; Starbucks.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWBC.2018.096244

International Journal of Web Based Communities, 2018 Vol.14 No.4, pp.335 - 352

Received: 11 Oct 2017
Accepted: 30 May 2018
Published online: 19 Nov 2018 *

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