From Feed to Conversation:How AI Brand Persona Continuity Shapes Social Presence and Consumer Trust

<title>Abstract</title> <p>Brands increasingly rely on artificial intelligence to maintain recognizable brand voice across social media, product communication, and chatbot-based service encounters. This conceptual paper introduces the Persona-Avatar Continuity-Trust (PACT) Model to explain how consumers' familiarity with an AI persona in social media may shape trust when they later interact with a recognizably continuous chatbot avatar. Drawing on parasocial relationship theory, virtual influencer research, anthropomorphism, social presence, dual-route trust formation, AI disclosure, expectation-confirmation reasoning, self-determination theory, self-brand congruity, and cross-cultural marketing, the paper develops an integrative theory-building framework. The model proposes that threshold-level familiarity with a persona can pre-activate social presence in later chatbot interactions, enabling a persona carryover effect that supports affective and cognitive trust. This process is conditional on avatar-persona continuity, truthful disclosure, perceived competence, performance-expectation fit, consumer digital literacy, persona selection agency, machine-heuristic preferences, and cultural context. The paper advances eight testable propositions linking persona continuity to trust formation and downstream outcomes such as engagement, loyalty, and brand equity. It shifts the unit of analysis from isolated AI touchpoints to continuous AI-mediated brand relationships across content and conversation. The framework also offers practical guidance for managing persona drift, AI disclosure, human escalation, data protection, and meaningful consumer choice. Future research should validate the model through staged experiments, longitudinal exposure designs, measurement development, non-avatar controls, and cross-cultural field studies.</p>