Role of Social Media Marketing Activities (SMMAs) in Apparel Brands Customer Response: A Moderated Mediation Analysis

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This manuscript presents descriptive analyses of the Role of Social Media in Apparel Brands Marketing to Enhance Customer Response. First of all, the authors chose an interesting topic – both theoretically and managerially. There are a number of positive aspects to the current paper that should be noted.  The Introduction is thorough and presents the case for the importance of this area very well. The literature review has well developed and structured and definitely, the model has a contribution to the literature. There are some minor revision that I expect the authors to respond to them accordingly.

First, there are many well-established papers in the domain of Facebook advertising, YouTube advertising etc. that were not considered in the manuscript. Second, there are many studies that already proved the types of social media vary in the level of user experience and interaction. Why do the authors consider a construct as a social media channel? Wasn’t it better to focus on one of the social media channel (e.g., YouTube)? What was the logical reason behind your decision? This issue is definitely one of the limitations of this manuscript.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer, 

We are thankful for all of your precious comments. All the comments are carefully addressed. The detail report is attached below. 

Regard

Zobi Khan

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Overall, I think this is an interesting paper. What I miss here is an explicit link to the topic of business sustainability. Therefore, I suggest the authors to add some links to business sustainability in the introduction and discussion/conclusion section.

I would also like to provide the authors with the following suggestions to improve their paper:

-It may be useful to strengthen the links between Uses and Gratification Theory (par. 2.1) and this study (why this theory is important for this study).

-In the ‘Sample and procedure’ paragraph (3.3.1) it would be interesting to add some information about how the apparel brands were selected by the respondents (for example, were respondents asked to refer to an apparel brand they knew or was the apparel brand suggested by the researchers?)

-As regards measurement model validity (tab. 2) it is recommended to run only one CFA with all the constructs together (as a consequence, there will be only one measurement model and only set of CFA Model goodness of fit indices). As regards fit indexes, it would be also interesting to add the value of the Chi-square/degrees of freedom ratio. A brief discussion of discriminant validity would also be valuable.

Some minor points:

-lines 66: add Gurevitch to Katz and Blumler (Uses and Gratification Theory was developed by these three co-authors together).

-line 254: “measurement model validity” instead of “model validity”

-H3, H4, H5, H6: “mediates the relationship between FSMMAs and..” instead of “mediates the effects of FSMMAs and..”

Finally, language proofreading is recommended before publication.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We are thankful for your valuable suggestions. All the comments are addressed carefully and attached below. 

Regard

Zobi Khan

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Thank you for the opportunity of reviewing this paper. It addresses an interesting and novel topic and uses adequate scientific methods for investigation. The paper is well structured, well organized and well written. I consider it as publishable, with the only mention that the title could be revisited, for example The role of social in..., or How social media enhances...?.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We are thankful for your valuable suggestions. All the comments are addressed carefully and attached below. 

Regard

Zobi Khan

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors have revised the paper according to the suggestions I provided earlier and, to my view, it can be now be published.

I only would like to indicate a couple of typos to be corrected:

-p. 3, line 114: ‘Smith, 2011’ should be changed into ‘Smith [41]’

-in H7, H8, H9 and H10 (p. 6) an ‘S’ is missing in the acronym ‘SMMAs’ (it should be changed into ‘SSMMAs’)

-p. 12, line 384: ‘brand image’ instead of ‘bran image’

-p. 14, line 431: add ‘are’ between ‘our results’ and ‘not only consistent’

-p. 15, line 472: delete ‘but’

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We are thankful for your precious time. All the comments are addressed and highlighted in the updated manuscript. 

The detail response letter is also attached.

Thank you. 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx