Customer satisfaction and loyalty with corporate multi-brand websites in an era of social media and misinformation

In the age of social media, are brand websites still relevant? Confronted by social media, multi-brand companies face a challenge to control their brand image and advertising content. Building an interactive website, as a common umbrella to their many brands can produce a successful customer experience leading to satisfaction and brand loyalty. This paper investigates e-loyalty toward multi-brand websites that aggregate, on a single website, brands and products belonging to the same parent company (corporate brand). Using a quasi-experiment on two major corporate multi-brand websites, the study uncovers a positive multi-brand experience effect coming from the benefits of having multiple brands on the same site. The multi-brand experience on e-loyalty is stronger for first-time visitors compared to repeat visitors and e-loyalty increases with the number of brands purchased before visiting the website. The study provides strong evidence to support a positive effect of multi-brand websites on e-loyalty.