Enhancing fair trade customer engagement: the role of social media advertising

For the FT movement to have a significant impact on the global economic system, it is necessary to enhance customer relations and expand commercial objectives (Karjalainen and Moxham, 2013). Despite customers’ growing awareness about the negative externalities of the current production and consumption systems (Gillani et al., 2021), previous research has reported lack of sufficient knowledge and trust as main barriers to FT purchase intentions and communication efforts from FT organizations are required in order to gain customer trust and engagement (Bezençon and Blili, 2009.) From a marketing perspective, SMA is an effective tool to educate customers and strengthen customer relations because it is more credible, informative and pleasant than traditional advertising (Voorveld et al., 2018; Cheung et al., 2019). Therefore, the aim of this research is to investigate the impact of online communication on FT customer engagement. More precisely, the research examines the relation between informativeness, credibility and entertainment of SMA by a FT organization and customer engagement, which is assessed in terms of re-purchase intentions, frequency of purchasing and WoM, including E-WoM. Because of the aforementioned literature, the following hypotheses are formulated: H1: Informativeness of FT social media advertising is positively related to customer engagement H2: Credibility of FT social media advertising is positively related to customer engagement H3: Entertainment of FT social media advertising is positively related to customer engagement Lastly, since informativeness, credibility and entertainment of the advertising contribute to the development of favorable customer attitudes toward the advertising, the research also investigates the relation between overall attitude toward FT advertising and customer loyalty. H4: An overall positive attitude toward FT social media advertising is positively related to customer engagement