Search results

The proliferation of social media, new generations of digital natives and the profusion of wireless campuses promise to revolutionise teaching and learning in the twenty-first century. No consensus exists on how to introduce Web 2.0 technologies into an educational context, so whilst it is intuitive that educators have a vital role in determining and evaluating the uses and implications of social media, there is a lack of research both into general pedagogic questions and into the particulars of introducing blogs to the classroom. The potential for blogging in education is explored through a review of international research, exemplars of good practice are cited and a qualitative case study of the integration of social media across a range of college level courses is presented. Vignettes from the case study illustrate both the successes enjoyed and the difficulties encountered introducing individual and group blogs. The majority of students endorse the use of blogs and report how blogs support their learning by codifying search trails, improving writing styles, help the visualisation of the process of their own and classmates’ work, how group blogs facilitate the coordination of collaborative projects and how for many blogging has become an integral part of their educational experience.

As industries are increasingly globalized, our students’ future workplaces require facility with cross-cultural collaboration, yet curricula often remain situated within the home culture. This chapter presents a qualitative case study on a collaborative project between students in London, Hong Kong, and Singapore. An overview of the process is given drawing on the experiences of the teachers and students involved, informing a discussion around the issues inherent in the internationalization of the curriculum. Tutors created a shared private Facebook group to connect London College of Fashion students with students at City University Hong Kong and LASALLE College of the Arts Singapore. Students worked on separate but aligned briefs that mirror contemporary working patterns and allowed co-creation of educational experiences beyond the geographic and time constraints of working internationally, specifically addressing issues around global and local communications. The Facebook platform was used separately and collaboratively to support students’ learning and the digitally mediated collaboration allowed for flexibility in when and how education took place, providing a third space for co-creation of learning: a global classroom.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the power of social media networks, namely Instagram, in building brand communities and co-creating value for brands. By analysing the 2015 campaign #withoutshoes by TOMS, the authors intend to demonstrate how the value creation process can be extended to involve all stakeholders and raise the effectiveness of a brand’s communication campaign.

A qualitative approach was taken to enable an understanding of online consumer behaviour. A series of qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with retail and marketing professionals from the TOMS brand to explore brand strategy. The TOMS Instagram account was analysed for a specific marketing communications event and summative content analysis was applied to the brand’s Instagram profile in order to allow for an in-depth exploration of the co-creation process. Triangulation was used for the multiple sources of evidence in order to build the study and to establish the convergence of data results, to diminish bias and to increase accuracy of the research data (Saunders et al., 2009).

Through a detailed overview of the campaign developed by TOMS, this paper explores how TOMS fosters the formation of consumer-brand-relationships as well as maps out the advantages of value co-creation. The research findings support the literature on co-creation, which argues that the way to achieve innovation and value creation in the changing and challenging marketing landscape is through co-creation. This study adds to the findings that co-creation strategies are a privileged manner of nurturing customer relationships and of lowering costs for marketing and research and development (Sawhney et al., 2005; Prandelli et al., 2006).

There are a relatively limited number of studies focusing on the Instagram platform, and of those carried out thus far most concentrate on how the platform interprets cultural issues, rather than how it can be used effectively as a marketing strategy and how it can leverage user’s preferences. Also, not a lot of studies have focused on the relationship between value co-creation and its relevance and impact on brands through engagement processes and the role of experience in brand building. Brand value co-creation through human experiences can provide considerable implications for brand management (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004a) as well as be a key component in the building process of customer experiences. This study suggests new approaches to getting useful insights about how brands can use social media to further engage with their target audience though an integrative framework of brand value co-creation with theoretical underpinning.

Using social capital theory as the theoretical framework, the purpose of this study is to examine if shared value, the norm of reciprocity and social bonding within a small fashion brand's Instagram page transfers to the overall perception and purchase intention toward the brand. Further, the authors test perceived benefit (i.e. perceived usefulness and perceived enjoyment) as anteceding variables along with the social capital variables. More specifically, this study investigates (1) the influence of shared value and norm of reciprocity on social bonding on the Instagram page, (2) the influence of perceived usefulness and perceived enjoyment on social bonding on the Instagram page, (3) the mediating effect of brand trust and brand identification on the relationship between social bonding and purchase intention and (4) and the moderating role of the generational cohort on the hypothesized relationships.

Through an online survey, 599 usable data were collected to test the proposed research framework using partial least squares structural equation modeling.

The results identify significant influences of shared value, norm of reciprocity and perceived enjoyment on social bonding. Brand identification and brand trust both have significant mediating effects between social bonding and purchase intention. Further, the results show that the mediating effect of brand trust is significantly higher for Generation Y, while the mediating effect of brand identification is significantly higher for Generation Z.

The study findings provide important implications for small fashion brands operating in a social media realm.