Do “Likes” in a Brand Community Always Make You Buy More?

Online brand communities often use social plug-in features, such as the Like button, to facilitate social interactions and engage users with the communities and brands. However, whether and how such a community feature affects the purchase decisions of users remain open questions. Leveraging the staggered adoption of the Like feature by users in an online brand community, we empirically investigate how the purchase behavior of users changes after the adoption of this feature. Surprisingly, we find that the order number and expenditure of an average user decrease by 4.1% and 25.0%, respectively, after the user starts to use this feature. Specifically, after the adoption of the Like feature, users’ order number and expenditure preeminently decrease by 3.4% and 21.1% online, respectively, and slightly decrease by 0.7% and 4.7% offline, respectively. The treatment effect of the adoption is not always negative but varies over time and across users. First, the Like feature adoption has a positive effect on users’ purchases in the first two months (primarily through enhancing their community participation), and the treatment effect turns negative in subsequent months, leading to the overall negative treatment effect on purchases. Second, the negative treatment effect likely stems from unflattering social comparison and can become weaker or even positive when users accrue more Likes from other users. However, only a small proportion of users receive sufficient Likes from other community users to be motivated to purchase more. We further conduct a scenario-based online experiment to corroborate our findings and elucidate the underlying mechanisms. Our results caution against potential downsides of the Like feature in online communities and provide valuable managerial implications.