Research on the Impact of Brand Narrative Strategy on Consumer Brand Loyalty in the Digital Media Era

Abstract

We examine how brand narrative strategy affects consumer brand loyalty in the digital media environment. The sequential mediating roles of narrative transportation and consumer brand identification are identified, along with the moderating role of perceived brand authenticity. By collecting survey data from 876 valid respondents who actively follow brand accounts on digital media platforms in China's mainland, we test the proposed model. Brand narrative strategy is conceptualised as a second-order construct that encompasses narrative authenticity, coherence, relatability and interactivity. Consumer brand loyalty is measured as a composite of attitudinal commitment and behavioural repurchase intention. Using multiple linear regression analysis with bias-corrected bootstrap mediation testing, a significant positive direct effect of brand narrative strategy on consumer brand loyalty is found. Narrative transportation and consumer brand identification jointly and sequentially mediate this relationship, and the total indirect effect accounts for roughly half of the total effect. The sequential path from brand narrative strategy through narrative transportation to consumer brand identification and then to loyalty is statistically significant. This result supports the stimulus-organism-response logic that an experiential state must first be converted into a durable relational state before it can sustain loyalty over time. Perceived brand authenticity significantly amplifies the conversion of narrative strategy into loyalty, as moderation analysis demonstrates. Consumers who judge the brand narrative as authentic exhibit a markedly steeper loyalty response, a pattern that is found to be robust when considering simple slope analysis. A larger direct effect of narrative strategy and a greater contribution of narrative transportation emerge from short video platforms and from younger consumers, whereas consumer brand identification carries a greater share of the loyalty effect on content community platforms and among older consumers. The stability of the core findings is found to be robust when considering a behavioural-only loyalty measure and a subsample restricted to established brand relationships.