ENGAGING CULINARY CONSUMERS THROUGH ENCOURAGING BRAND STORYGIVING ON AN INSTAGRAM BRAND COMMUNITY – AN ACTION RESEARCH

Even though marketing activities in brand storytelling have increasingly become popular in many industries, research has rarely explored consumers' brand storygiving as a strategic marketing action for brand value co-creation tool. This is especially alarming in the context of social media embedded brand community. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the performance of marketing action in the form of social media content about encouraging consumers for brand storygiving through content co-creation activity by consumers. In this sense, this research measures the performance in terms of the consumer engagement towards the posts of such content. In this study, consumers are invited to participate in a call-to-action for a contest in a brand community on Instagram to share their brand experience. This research is conducted through a collaboration with a small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) of a food company in Indonesia. Following the action research methodology, results show that repeatedly posting the social media marketing action campaign daily within a month is not followed by a significant linear increase in consumers' daily number of engagement. But increasing the daily frequency of posting, i.e. frequency of exposure, is effective in increasing daily total number of consumer engagement, specifically the endorsement engagement. Besides, the action may be effective in increasing sales performance of the brand.