Online fan community engagement : bright and dark sides for human brand loyalty

The current study aims to examine how engaging in online fan communities influences loyalty behavior for a human brand in positive and negative ways through members’ feelings of social well-being and normative community pressure. Structural equation modeling analysis was conducted to test our proposed hypotheses by using data collected from various online fan communities of human brands in South Korea, such as singers, actors, athletes, and politicians. Our study finds that social well-being and normative community pressure, both of which stemmed from fan community engagement, played significant roles in human brand loyalty. More specifically, fan community engagement increases members’ social well-being, which, in turn, enhances members’ loyalty to the respective human brands. On the other hand, fan community engagement also increases the normative community pressure for members, which, in turn, decreases the loyalty for human brands. Our findings contribute to the extant literature by showing how dynamics in fan community engagement influence human brand loyalty, as the previous studies focusing on the relationship between fan communities and human brand loyalty in the literature are scarce.