This study examined the influence of User Generated Branding (UGB) on consumers’ attitudes and purchase intentions by comparing it to brand generated advertising on the world’s largest social media website: Facebook (eMarketer, 2016). The research was theoretically grounded by the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), which helped in understanding how consumers’ attitudes toward a behavior would form their behavioral intentions. The advent of User Generated Branding on Facebook has radically changed the communication patterns between brands and consumers. Facebook, at its core, is a place for interpersonal communications. Therefore, it offers its members with emotional benefits through networking and conversations. But, as it is slowly evolving into a marketing platform (Scale, 2008), users have found many practical commercial implications in terms of information search on the platform before deciding to purchase an item. UGB refers to “the strategic and operative management of brand-related user generated content (UGC) by the brand and its consumers to achieve brand goals (Burmann & Arnhold, 2009, p. 3).” Brand-related user generated content is any type of data, information or media, voluntarily created and contributed by regular people who are consumers of a specific brand, which comes across as useful or entertaining to other consumers (Krumm et al., 2008). On the other hand, brand generated advertising is any form of media-related strategies and tactics, usually paid, deployed by a business in order to establish as well as maintain effective and ongoing communications with its customers (Stuhfaut & Davis, 2010). The current research tried to explore into this collaboration between consumers and brands as well as other consumers on Facebook (Saxena & Khanna, 2013). The present research posited that UGB, as an added consumer interaction touch point about brands on Facebook, could play a more decisive role than brand generated ads in shaping users’ perceptions, attitudes, and purchase intentions. 669 undergraduate students from a major university in Southeastern USA voluntarily participated in this research. In an online survey, the subjects were randomly assigned to one of the two experimental conditions, framed as either a UGB Facebook post or a brand generated ad post. Inattentive and inconsistent responses were eliminated using dummy test questions. So, the final sample size consisted of 539 participants (n = 539). The findings suggested that there was not a statistically significant difference in how these two sources of content impacted users’ attitudes and purchase intentions (p = .05). Both UGB posts and brand generated ads on Facebook were seen to play complementary roles in influencing consumers’ intentions to purchase. This research offered useful insights to marketers and advertisers in finding the right kind of content combination on Facebook that would induce favorable perceptions, attitudes and purchase intention. Practical implications showed that, on Facebook, brands should flexibly adapt their promotional strategies to users’ brand-related interactions. From an academic perspective, the present study was seen to contribute toward filling the prevailing gap in the literature in investigating consumer behavior patterns related to UGB on Facebook, considering the ever increasing popularity of the website (de Vries et al., 2012).
