The impact of customer satisfaction, brand trust and brand loyalty on online brand advocacy

Brand advocacy is an important factor in the emergence of brand power that affects customer preferences, as it involves the defence of brands by customers with a deep passion in the face of negative comments. In traditional marketing, sharing customer experiences is more restrictive and time-consuming on offline platforms, but with the existence of online platforms, these platforms have turned into environments where experiences and advice are shared without boundaries. Brand advocates now share their experiences not only offline but also on online platforms. Therefore, this study aims to examine the impact of customer satisfaction, brand trust and brand loyalty on online brand advocacy. In the literature, the concept of online brand advocacy is a newly researched concept and and this study is important in terms of providing a source for future studies. This thesis has three main objectives: (1) to reveal the effect of customer satisfaction and brand loyalty on online brand advocacy, (2) to investigate the mediating role of brand trust and brand identification in this effect, and (3) to examine the moderating role of personality traits. An online survey was applied to 413 sports shoes users who actively use the internet. The collected data were analysed using SPSS, LISREL and SPSS Process Macro programs. As a result of the research, it was concluded that customer satisfaction has a positive significant effect on brand trust, brand trust has a positive significant effect on brand loyalty and loyalty has a positive significant effect on all sub-dimensions of online brand advocacy. In addition, brand identification was found to have a partial mediating effect in the relationship between loyalty and online brand advocacy sub-dimensions. When the regulatory role of personality traits in the relationship between brand loyalty and online brand advocacy was examined, no significant regulatory effect was found in general. However, it was found that openness had a negative moderating effect on brand information sharing, agreeableness had a negative moderating effect on brand defence and virtual positive expressions, and finally, responsibility had a negative moderating effect on brand information sharing.