Cross-Cultural Perspective on Customer Engagement With Firm- Generated Content on Social Media: The Study of Nordic and Eastern-European GLOBE Clusters.

With many companies failing to engage their customers on social media, this study aims at developing a deeper understanding of the role of culture in customer engagement on social media. As studies of this phenomena are still relatively sparse, the study has explorative and qualitative character and will lead to the propositions regarding how cultural dimensions influence customer engagement behaviour on social media, as well as, which appeals in firm-generated content stimulate customer engagement with social media in different cultural clusters. Even though for the last few years social media and its effective utilization for marketing purposes have been debated also in academia, there are several challenges that the researchers did not address. Little is known about how firm-generated content shapes customer engagement which is understood here as consumers' behaviour of consuming, 'liking', commenting and sharing firm-generated content. While social media researchers focus on consumer-to-consumer communities and user-generated content, the firm-created content is also important for practitioners, therefore, it becomes vital to investigate how companies can stimulate engagement with it on social media. This will be achieved by adopting interpretive approach and building on the Cognitive Response Theory and Affordances Approach in order to explain engagement with firm-generated content. The GLOBE cultural framework will be utilized to investigate differences and similarities in engagement on social media in different countries. The study will apply event-contingent unstructured diary as data collection method, and researched subjects will consist of countries representing two GLOBE cultural clusters: Nordic cluster (Finland, Sweden) and Eastern-European cluster (Poland, Hungary). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]