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which in turn boost the brand loyalty and brand passion. According to Fischer and Reuber (2011), consumers feel the social
satisfaction or brand passion when they go through the user-generated content, and it notably impacts their behavioral responses.
Consumers feel the pleasure with user-generated content on social media platform because they can participate and get involved in
sharing their passion for a brand with other consumers who share the similar interest (Habibi et al., 2014) and produce the sense of
community among them. In addition, user-generated content has become a major element in creating emotional responses that
eventually affected the consumer decision making (Arif, Aslam, & Siddiqui, 2020). That is why consumers can feel the passion
when they review the user-generated content. Furthermore, brand trust is one of the factors that positively influences brand passion
(Ghorbanzadeh, Saeednia, & Rahehagh, 2020). To conclude, user-generated content is able to positively influence brand trust and
brand passion (Demba et al., 2019). Thus, the below hypothesis is proposed:

H3: There is a statistically significant impact of user-generated social media communication on brand passion.

2.4.4 Brand Passion and Purchase Intention

The main purpose of marketing communication is to stimulate purchase intention. Gilal et al. (2019) revealed that a brand will
likely witness improvement in consumer behavior outcomes when the brand can create emotional bonds with their consumers,
which is brand passion. Albrecht et al. (2011) illustrated that the emotional connection of consumers with a brand causes a higher
possibility of repeatedly purchasing the same brand or higher intention to purchase the brand regularly. This shows that building
brand passion can increase the chances that existing consumers will keep buying from the brand or the consumers will try out other
products from the brand although the price might be higher. Empirical studies by Loureiro et al. (2017) and Herrando et al. (2017)
indicated that consumers’ passion towards a brand positively affect their intention to recommend the advertised brand to others.
Hemsley-Brown and Alnawas (2016) found that brand passion notably improves consumer engagement, social network support,
and price insensitivity. Based on the above discussion, brand passion can seemingly influence consumer purchase intention
positively. Therefore, this study hypothesizes that:
H4: Brand passion has a statistically significant impact on purchase intention.

2.5 Research Framework

Firm-created social
media
communication H2

H4
H1 Brand passion Purchase intention

User-generated
social media H3
communication

Figure 1: Research Framework
The framework in Figure 1 was adopted from “Social media marketing and customers’ passion for brands” by Mukherjee (2020)
who emphasized the firm-created social media communication and user-generated social media communication can effectively
cause the passion for the advertised brand and eventually create a purchase intention in the mind of audiences.

3.0 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
3.1 Research Design
Research design refers to the comprehensive plan to connect the conceptual research problems to the relevant and achievable
empirical research (Asenahabi, 2019). According to Creswell (2014), research design an investigation that develops specific

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