Long live friendship? Relationships among friendship, trust and brand loyalty: a study of Starbucks

Undoubtedly, Facebook has become a rapidly emerging social media during recent decades. It has not only successfully expanded the traditional 'consumer-brand' relationship from the physical channels to the virtual ones, but also shaped complete interaction/communication model between corporate brand and consumers by aggressively build up its brand community. Though Starbucks has already been a well-known brand in Taiwan, few of social media studies has concerned with the influence of friendship and trust on fan's brand loyalty. In view of this, this study based on 340 valid fan samples from Starbuck's fan pages used structural equation modelling (SEM) to validate the research hypotheses. The empirical findings showed that friendship and trust both impact fans' brand loyalty to Starbucks while friendship also influenced trust. Besides, the moderated effect of consumer personality partially existed in our research model.