Social media marketing and restaurant purchase intention: do online brand community identification and gender matter

Social media marketing (SMM) creates diverse content via social network sites to promote different products, services, information and ideas. This study is built on the stimulus-organism-response framework and uses gratifications theory. It aims to investigate online brand community identification (OBCI) and purchase intention as major consequences of SMM activities (SMMAs). A structural equation modelling approach and a PROCESS macro were applied to analyse 338 online questionnaires completed by Facebook users who follow restaurant Facebook pages. The findings revealed that SMMAs have a significant positive influence on OBCI and purchase intention. Furthermore, OBCI acts as a mediator between SMMAs and purchase intention. These results indicate that gender role positively moderates the direct and indirect effect of SMMAs on purchase intention. Finally, the moderated mediation analysis findings suggest that female customers receive a high level of OBCI when interacting with SMMAs, which, in turn, increases purchase intention relative to males.