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The purpose of this paper is to show how active participants within personal challenge virtual communities (e.g. virtual health communities, online legal forums, etc.) derive learning benefits from their involvement within the community. In doing so, the research conceptualises and tests a model of engagement within such virtual communities.

This research was conducted through the design of a survey administered to an online panel of active participants from several virtual health communities. Structural equation modelling was used to test the conceptual model.

Along with well-researched concepts such as social identification, this research identifies diagnostic and prescriptive benefits as key learning benefits associated with active participation within personal challenge communities. These benefits drive social support which individuals attain from these virtual communities, which, in turn, drives engagement within the community. It is also found that anticipated negative emotions from leaving the community mediate social support and engagement.

This is one of the first studies to develop a model of consumer engagement with personal challenge virtual communities. The findings make a contribution to the field of online communities by showing how learning benefits (diagnostic and prescriptive) transpire within these communities and how these benefits lead to greater community engagement.

This paper aims to examine the effect of customer-to-customer (C2C) interaction while using a service on the willingness of consumers to engage in altruistic customer participation (CP) or co-production efforts aimed at helping other customers. It further examines the role of consumer skepticism toward the service category in moderating the effects of C2C interaction on altruistic CP and customer satisfaction.

A survey methodology was used to collect data from 374 consumers of health-care services in India. The data collection involved interviews of patients visiting diabetes clinics and focused primarily on the interaction between customers and their willingness to participate in educating members of the community on diabetic self-care.

The analysis shows that C2C interaction positively affects customer satisfaction and willingness to engage in altruistic CP. Consumer category skepticism does not moderate the effect of C2C interaction on customer willingness to engage in altruistic CP. However, category skepticism does have the moderating effect of significantly reducing the positive effect of C2C interaction on customer satisfaction.

Data for this study were collected via interviews of consumers in India. Each consumer was interviewed by a trained interviewer. Although the authors do not detect any systematic influence in the results, the possibility of bias is acknowledged. Regarding the research implications, the finding that category skepticism does not moderate the effect of C2C interaction on willingness to engage in altruistic CP suggest that ultimately consumers may have stronger commitment and loyalty to themselves and that their relationships with the firm’s might be peripheral.

The study finds that consumer skepticism toward a service category can have adverse effects for service co-creation. The authors advise managers in troubled industries not to focus exclusively on improving brand differentiation but to also consider working with major industry players and regulators to address the deepest fears of consumers.

The findings have implications for the service dominant logic of marketing in that it suggests that category skepticism is disruptive to the value integration process on which service co-creation relies for value creation. This has strong implications for how managers should structure their interaction processes with customers and for future research that seeks to them prove customer productivity.

This study aims to investigate whether the antecedents of co-creation influence braggart word-of-mouth (WoM) in a participative leisure context, theorising the concept of co-created food well-being and highlighting implications for interactive experience co-design.

A sequential mixed-method approach was used to test a theoretical model; 25 in-depth interviews with cooking class participants were conducted, followed by a post-experience survey (n = 575).

Qualitative results suggest braggart WoM is rooted in active consumer participation in co-designing leisure experiences. The structural model confirms that participation in value co-creating activities (i.e. co-design, customer-to-customer (C2C) interaction), alongside perceived support from service providers, increases consumer perceptions of co-creation and stimulates braggart WoM. Degree of co-creation and support from peers mediate some relationships.

Limited by cross-sectional data from one experiential consumption format, the results nevertheless demonstrate the role of active participation in co-design and C2C interactions during value co-creation. This implies that co-created and co-designed leisure experiences can intensify post-consumption behaviours and potentially enhance food well-being.

The results highlight that integrating customer participation into service design, while also developing opportunities for peer support on-site, can stimulate braggart WoM.

Extends burgeoning literature on co-creation and co-design in leisure services. By encouraging active customer participation while providing support and facilitating C2C interactions, service providers can enhance value co-creation, influencing customer experiences and food well-being. Accordingly, the concept of co-created food well-being is introduced.

The purpose of this study is to investigate members’ reactions to the forced closure of a narrative video game brand community and its participatory culture.

The BioWare Social Network forums closure was announced in a thread, which attracted 8,891 posts. These were analysed using thematic analysis, facilitated by the software program Leximancer and non-participatory netnography.

The brand community and participatory culture members were predominantly distressed because they would lose their relationships with each other and access to the participatory culture’s creative output.

Previous research suggested that video game players cannot be fans and that player-generated content is exploitative. However, members, self-identified as fans, encouraged BioWare’s use of their player-created content for financial gain and articulated the community’s marketing benefits, all of which have implications for Fan and Game Studies’ researchers. Research using primary data could identify brand communities and participatory cultures’ specific benefits and their members’ attitudes about brands’ commercial use of their outputs. Further research is required to identify other products and brands not suitable for establishing brand communities on social media to determine the best ways to manage them.

Addressing narrative brand communities’ complaints quickly can prevent negative financial outcomes and using social media sites for brand communities may not be suitable structurally or because of members’ privacy concerns. Furthermore, consumers often have intense emotional bonds with narrative brands, their communities and participatory cultures, which marketers may underestimate or misunderstand.

This study of the unique phenomenon of the forced closure of a narrative brand community and its participatory culture increased understandings about them.

The ever-growing popularity of social media platforms is evidence of consumers engaging emotionally with these brands. Given the prominence of social media in society, the purpose of this paper is to understand social media platforms from a “brand” perspective through examining the effect of consumers’ emotional attachment on social media consumer-based brand equity (CBBE).

This paper develops a model that outlines how emotional brand attachment with social media explains social media CBBE via shaping consumer perceptions of brand credibility and consumer satisfaction. An online survey of 340 Australian social media consumers provided data for empirical testing. The inclusion of multiple context-relevant covariates and use of a method-variance-adjusted data matrix, as well as an examination of an alternative model, adds robustness to the results.

The findings of this paper support the conceptual model, and the authors identify strong relationships between the focal variables. A phantom model analysis explicates specific indirect effects of emotional brand attachment on CBBE. The authors also find support for a fully mediated effect of emotional brand attachment on social media brand equity. Further, they broaden the nomological network of emotional brand attachment, outlining key outcomes.

This paper offers a conceptual mechanism (a chain-of-effects) of how consumer emotional brand attachment with social media brands translates into social media CBBE. It also finds that a brand’s credibility as well as its ability to perform against consumer expectations (i.e. satisfaction) are equally effective in translating emotional brand attachment into social media CBBE.

Social media brands are constantly challenged by rapid change and ongoing criticism over such issues as data privacy. The implications from this paper suggest that managers should make investments in creating (reinforcing) emotional connections with social media consumers, as this will favorably impact CBBE by way of a relational mechanism, that is, via enhancing credibility and consumer satisfaction.

Lately, social media in general has suffered from a crisis of trust in society. The enhanced credibility of social media brands resulting from consumers’ emotional attachments will potentially serve to enhance its acceptance as a credible form of media in society.

Social media platforms are often examined as brand-building platforms. This paper adopts a different perspective, examining social media platforms as brands per se and the effects of emotional attachments that consumers develop towards these. This paper offers valuable insights into how consumers’ emotional attachments drive vital brand judgments such as credibility and satisfaction, ultimately culminating into social media CBBE.

This paper aims to explore the virtual experience to understand its components and its effects on consumers’ real world.

Our approach relies on a rarely used projective method: “Album-on-Line” (AOL). This technique allows identifying consumers’ representations of their experience. It uses images to immerse participants in a virtual experience and to lead an individual reflection, then a group reflection.

Virtual experiences have utilitarian, hedonic, psychological and social dimensions. When immersing in virtual experiences, consumers’ perception and consumption of products and services change. A projection occurs leading to an identification to virtual characters. This projection also leads to a consumption aiming at finding back the excitement and challenge lived during virtual experiences.

The main limitation of this research relates with the fuzzy distinction between the virtual and the electronic in consumers’ minds and even in the literature. Future work should propose a multidisciplinary definition of the virtual experience, considering its specificities and components.

This research offers companies a better understanding of consumers’ motivations to live virtual experiences. It may bring insights on how to provide a more customized offering and a more adapted communication.

Compared to previous work, the present research offers a better understanding of the components of online and offline virtual experiences by considering the virtual in its broadest meaning. The use of the AOL technique enabled a closer look at the specificities of the virtual experience as perceived by consumers. It was also possible to explore the “post-experience” stage by understanding the effect of virtual experiences on consumers’ perceptions and consumptions.

The marketing literature uses five different experience terms that are supposed to represent different streams of research. Many papers do not provide a definition, most of the used definitions are unclear, the different experience terms have similar dimensionality and are regularly used interchangeably or have the same meaning. In addition, the existing definitions are not adequately informed from other disciplines that have engaged with experience. This paper aims to build a comprehensive conceptual framework of experience in marketing informed by related disciplines aiming to provide a more holistic definition of the term.

This research follows previously established procedures by conducting a systematic literature review of experience. From the approximately 5,000 sources identified in three disciplines, 267 sources were selected, marketing (148), philosophy (90) and psychology (29). To address definitional issues the analysis focused on enlightening four premises.

This paper posits that the term brand experience can be used in all marketing-related experiences and proposes four premises that may resolve the vagaries associated with the term’s conceptualization. The four premises address the what, who, how and when of brand experience and aim to rectify conceptual issues. Brand experience is introduced as a multi-level phenomenon.

The suggested singular term, brand experience, captures all experiences in marketing. The identified additional elements of brand experience, such as the levels of experience and the revision of emotions within brand experience as a continuum, tempered by repetition, should be considered in future research.

The multi-level conceptualization may provide a greater scope for dynamic approaches to brand experience design thus providing greater opportunities for managers to create sustainable competitive advantages and differentiation from competitors.

This paper completes a systematic literature review of brand experience across marketing, philosophy and psychology which delineates and enlightens the conceptualization of brand experience and presents brand experience in a multi-level conceptualization, opening the possibility for further theoretical, methodological and interdisciplinary promise.

The growing importance and considerable prestige that quality awards hold have encouraged firms to adopt “excellence models” as evaluation frameworks for organisational self‐assessment. This has contributed to the spread of a specific form of self‐assessment logic: primarily, the search for conformity to a set of non‐prescriptive requirements that reflect validated, leading‐edge management practices; secondarily, the search of alignment of practices with organisational needs and business factors. But the adoption of this kind of self‐assessment is not necessarily the proper “choice”, particularly for small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs). This paper examines the nature of the diagnostic processes incorporated in award‐based self‐assessment and in other diagnostic models developed in the organisational literature. This analysis provides the foundation for the development of a classification matrix that enables us to differentiate five self‐assessment approaches (paradigmatic, normative, situational, normative‐situational, and open), which can be implemented either with a process‐based or a non‐process‐based analytical frame. On the basis of this matrix we outline a “conceptual map” that could help SMEs in questioning the meaning and substance of “organisational self‐assessment” so as to choose knowingly and rationally frameworks and diagnostics instruments.

This chapter focuses on the implications of both the descriptive and prescriptive aspects of gender stereotypes for women in the workplace. Using the Lack of Fit model, we review how performance expectations deriving from descriptive gender stereotypes (i.e., what women are like) can impede women's career progress. We then identify organizational conditions that may weaken the influence of these expectations. In addition, we discuss how prescriptive gender stereotypes (i.e., what women should be like) promote sex bias by creating norms that, when not followed, induce disapproval and social penalties for women. We then review recent research exploring the conditions under which women experience penalties for direct, or inferred, prescriptive norm violations.