Investigating the mediating role of brand equity in the impact of social media marketing activities on customer response (Case study: Dorsa luxury brand)

The development of social media has made business owners think about these media as a tool to communicate more with customers and introduce their products and services. One of the major challenges in this area is measuring the impact of social media marketing activities on a brand's success. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of social media marketing on brand equity and consumer behavior among Dorsa brand customers who also follow the brand's pages on social media. The present study is an applied research that has been done in a survey. The statistical population of this study includes social media users who follow the official pages of Dorsa brand in these media. On the other hand, the reason for choosing Dorsa Leather is that this brand is engaged in advertising and branding activities on social media, especially Instagram. In this study, the sample size is 200 people. Also in this research the available sampling method has been used as the sampling method. Based on the results of significant value and path coefficients, social media marketing has a positive and significant effect on customer response and brand equity. Also, brand equity has a positive and significant effect on customer response. Because the significance value of all direct hypotheses of the research is greater than 95% at 95% confidence level. Also in this study to test the fourth hypothesis of the study, the VAF index or the inclusion of variance has been used. According to the obtained numbers, it can be concluded that brand equity has a full mediating role in the impact of social media marketing activities on customer response in luxury brands. That is, our mediating variable makes the whole effect of the independent variable dependent on its presence.