Customer brand engagement via value co-creation with hotel online media and travel websites and its effect on brand equity: the moderating role of culture

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to analyze how hotels’ customer brand engagement (CBE) can be enhanced through tourists’ value co-creation with hotel online media or travel websites, as a means of achieving greater brand equity. The analysis considers the role of tourist national culture and draws on service-dominant logic as a theoretical framework. A quantitative empirical study was conducted among Spanish and British hotel guests. The results of this study show that: hotel CBE has a positive and significant effect on hotel brand equity; for Spanish hotel guests, value co-creation with travel websites has a positive and significant effect on hotel CBE; and for British hotel guests, value co-creation with hotel online media has a positive effect on hotel CBE. The results of this study point to recommendations to guide hotel companies on how to achieve greater brand equity and CBE through value co-creation. The main contributions of this study are that: it expands the extant service-dominant logic literature; it demonstrates the influence of CBE on brand equity in the online environment; it demonstrates the moderating role that tourists’ national culture plays in the relationship between online value co-creation and CBE; and it empirically demonstrates the impact of value co-creation with the hotel online media and with travel websites as well as the existence of a new phase in the tourist customer journey (the dreaming phase).