<![CDATA[The purpose of this study is to determine the effect of social media marketing capability on customer loyalty with digital customer-centric intimacy capabilities as a mediating variable. Building on dynamic capabilities theory, we theorize that social media marketing capability positively influences customer loyalty indirectly by augmenting firms' ability to develop personalized, customer oriented, digitally enabled experience relationships. This study employed a quantitative cross-sectional survey design of 300 culinary MSME owners and managers who use social media to market their goods. Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) was used to analyze the data. The results indicate that social media marketing capability has no direct and significant effect on customer loyalty but exerts a strong positive indirect influence through digital customer-centric intimacy capability. In addition, digital customer centric-intimacy capability is positively related to customer loyalty and completely mediated the influence of social media marketing capability on customer loyalty. These findings suggest that the basic strategy to enhance customer loyalty is not just the use of social media marketing activities, but rather the ability of a firm to engage in meaningful, customized, and consistent digital interactions with customers. This paper adds to the dynamic capabilities literature by examining digital customer-centric intimacy capability as a second order relational capability that operates on operational digital marketing capability, transforming it into sustainable customer loyalty. Results also offer concrete managerial insights for culinary MSMEs to develop customer oriented digital marketing strategies that can bolster their long-run competitiveness.]]>
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