The impact of social media contents on brand equity and brand awareness (The Djiboutian perspective)

Despite the continuous growth of social media as a communication platform, there is still a knowledge gap regarding its impact on brand perception among experts and company executives. In order to delve deeper into this subject, we conducted an extensive online survey in Djibouti, involving a diverse group of 350 social media users. The primary objective of our research was to gain insights into the influence of both company-generated and user-generated social media communication on two key aspects: brand equity (BE) and brand awareness (BAR). To ensure a focused investigation, we chose to concentrate our study on four entities within the clothing industry, allowing us to evaluate the proposed model within a specific context. Our empirical investigations produced compelling and significant findings. We discovered that both Firm-generated communication, which includes official brand content and promotional materials, and User-generated social media communication, such as customer reviews, testimonials, and social media posts created by consumers, exerted a positive impact on brand equity.. Meanwhile, brand equity had a particularly favorable effect on brand awareness. As a result, brand awareness can indirectly benefit from both firm-created (FC) and user-generated (UG) communication. Keywords: Social media, firm-created communication, user-generated communication, brand equity, brand awareness.