The Impact of Cultural Capital, Brand Knowledge and Brand Engagement on Brand Attitude for Facebook Users - The case of music festival pages on Facebook

Interactions between consumers and brands as well as exposure to brands’ marketing campaigns are increasingly taking place on social networking sites such as Facebook. Brands believe that these interactions on social media ultimately increase consumers’ positive attitude towards their brands. However, research on the effectiveness of Facebook engagement with consumers, especially for the cultural industry is sparse and thus, academics are still not convinced. To add to that, for difficult brands such as music festivals, cultural capital could be an influencing factor. Namely, it can be argued that cultural capital replaces the influence of brand knowledge and engagement on brand attitude. This because it can be stated that brand knowledge and brand engagement are more or less embedded in cultural capital. Therefore, in this research, two music festivals (1) North Sea Jazz and (2) Pinkpop are studied in order to find to what extent cultural capital influences brand attitude. Furthermore, it is examined whether cultural capital makes the presumed positive effect of brand knowledge and brand engagement insignificant. The two festivals represent an institutionalized highbrow and an emerging highbrow festival respectively, as this could perhaps lead to interesting differences between the two types of festivals. Namely, research argues that both festivals attract consumers with differentiating levels of cultural capital. The current research is based on existing theories on determinants of brand attitude and thereby combines two research traditions, sociology and marketing. In order to measure the effects of cultural capital, brand knowledge and brand engagement on brand attitude, an online survey was conducted. Dutch Facebookers who are 18 years or older were recruited to participate in the research through Facebook. This study showed that cultural capital significantly impacts attitudes towards both festivals. Moreover, it showed that brand knowledge and brand engagement do have an additional significant effect on brand attitude for both North Sea Jazz as well as Pinkpop, even when included in the same model as cultural capital. Thus, it was found that cultural capital does not explain the effect of brand knowledge and brand engagement on brand attitude towards music festivals. Thereby, this research stressed the importance to consider consumers’ cultural capital for a brand attitude model, as well as that it substantiated the importance of brand knowledge and brand engagement for brand attitude.