Motivation recipes for brand-related social media use: A Boolean–fsQCA approach

Social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram provide various means for users to interact with others, by creating, sharing and commenting on content about anything, including brands and products. Such online brand-related activities may significantly influence a firm’s operations. To effectively manage these influences, marketers should understand consumer’s motivations to engage in brand-related social media use. This paper is one of the very few efforts to come to such an understanding. In this direction, a set-theoretic comparative approach is implemented—namely, fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis—as a means to capitalize on the merits of both qualitative and quantitative techniques, and provide a more nuanced coverage of how motives and their combinations affect social media use. The results of the proposed approach are compared with the results derived from the implementation of a mainstream quantitative analytical technique (i.e., multiple regression analysis), as well as the results of the qualitative study of Muntinga et al. (2011)—the only study so far examining different types of brand-related social media use and their motivations. By examining motivations for the full spectrum of social media use types (i.e., consuming, contributing and creating), the paper provides marketers and brand managers with valuable insights into online consumer behaviour in a social media-dominated era.