The Net generation in times of pandemic: Customers’ technology savviness and social media communication impact on customer-based brand equity

This paper follows the recent areas of interest trucked by Google Trends to investigate the importance of the customers’ technological savviness and firm’s social media communication at creation of brand equity. A special attention is paid at the so called ‘Net generation’ and its behavior during COVID-19 pandemic. The data was collected through an online survey distributed in Portugal with the assistance of Qualtrics online survey platform and counted with respondents that had a prior experience in following or engaging with brands on social media. To understand the relationships between Customer Technology Savviness (CTS), firm’s Social Media Communication (SMC) and Customer-Based Brand Equity (CBBE), this study applies the Partial Last Squares method of Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). The results of the multigroup analysis show that customers who used social media more heavily during pandemic denoted a stronger relationship between CTS and CBBE, CTS and SMC and between SMC and CBBE, of which the last was not confirmed in case of customers who made less use of social media since the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic.