A STUDY ON THE IMPACT MECHANISM OF SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING ON BRAND LOYALTY: DUAL MEDIATING EFFECTS BASED ON BRAND TRUST AND EMOTIONAL CONNECTION—EVIDENCE FROM MIXUE

บทคัดย่อ

This research article aims to: 1) examine the direct effect of social media marketing on brand loyalty among consumers of affordable mass-market tea beverage brands; 2) investigate the mediating roles of brand trust and emotional connection in the relationship between social media marketing and brand loyalty; and 3) compare the relative contributions of brand trust and emotional connection as dual psychological pathways through which social media marketing fosters brand loyalty. This study conducted a quantitative research study collecting data from 466 people using multistage stratified sampling from MIXUE consumers across lower-tier, first- and second-tier cities in China; analyzed the data using descriptive statistics, reliability and validity tests, correlation analysis, hierarchical regression, and Bootstrap mediation tests (5,000 samples, 95% CI) via SPSS.

The research results found that: 1) Social media marketing has a significant positive direct effect on brand loyalty (β = 0.648, p < 0.001), confirming that MIXUE’s three-dimensional social media approach synergistically drives both attitudinal and behavioral loyalty; 2) both brand trust and emotional connection serve as significant partial mediators, with brand trust accounting for 31.37% and emotional connection for 28.54% of the total effect, yielding a combined dual mediating effect of 59.94%; and 3) brand trust operates as a rational cognitive-affective pathway while emotional connection operates as an affective-identity pathway, and the two mechanisms function synergistically rather than exclusively, together dominating the social media marketing–brand loyalty relationship.