ABSTRACT
Over the past few years, social networking sites are increasingly popular in the area of relationship marketing. It provides the opportunity for brand marketers to extend relationship with their potential and existing consumers in the virtual environment. Still, little research has been done to examine the value of consumer-brand relationship within the scope of social networking sites. To address this gap, the current study examines the relationship value that consumers perceived as a result of befriending hospitality brand in social networking sites. A qualitative study was conducted with four focus groups involving twenty-eight respondents from six hospitality brand Facebook pages. The results indicated that they are five types of relationship benefits in the consumer-brand relationship value, namely information benefit, brand interaction benefit, psychological empowerment benefit, entertainment benefit and economic benefit. Also, respondents expressed concern over privacy and security issue as the main risk of having a relationship with hospitality brand in social networking sites. This article discusses managerial implications of the findings and suggests improvement for future research.
