Optimising Social Media Branding for Customer Engagement: A China-Malaysia Framework
Abstract
Online marketing plays a crucial role in worldwide branding. This writing aims to explore and determine how social and cultural dimensions affect customer engagement (CE) in online brand design in an intercultural setting and, in turn, affect brand loyalty and brand equity, further advancing the theory development of intercultural marketing in brand design and brand management. While intercultural branding activities increase, major problems around negative online engagement, digital inequality, miscommunication across cultures, and ethnocentric perspectives remain. These highlight the need to improve intercultural competence, sensitivity, and communication to enhance mutually beneficial CE in the digital era. Not only do successful online marketing strategies effectively utilize social media platforms and digital technologies, but they also understand how social and cultural dimensions influence brand design and customer engagement, particularly across cultures. Darla Deardorff’s intercultural competence model (ICM) provides a basic framework to promote in a multicultural setting; further, the expected outcomes suggest that the mediating effects of branded content experience, cultural and contextual factors, and the moderating influence of digital literacy are statistically significant. This conceptual framework can permit brands and marketers to improve CE and guide their management of assets and marketing activities through brand design; additionally, this writing provides novel perspectives on the relevance and significance of social and cultural dimensions in brand design.
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