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Understanding customers is critical for service researchers and practitioners. Today, customers are increasingly active online, and valuable information about their opinions, experiences and behaviors can be retrieved from a variety of online platforms. Online customer information creates new opportunities to design personalized and high-quality service. This paper aims to review how netnography as a method can help service researchers and practitioners to better use such data.

A systematic review and analysis were conducted on 321 netnography studies published in marketing journals between 1997 and 2017.

The systematic review reveals that netnography has been applied in a variety of ways across different marketing fields and topics. Based on the analysis of existing netnography literature, empirical, theoretical and methodological recommendations for future netnographic service research are presented.

This paper shows how netnography can offer service researchers unprecedented opportunities to access naturalistic online data about customers and, hence, why it is an important method for future service research.

Netnographic research can help service firms with, for example, service innovation, advertising and environmental scanning. This paper provides guidelines for service managers who want to use netnography as a market research tool.

Netnography has seen limited use in service research despite many promising applications in this field. This paper is the first to encourage and support service researchers in their use of the method and aims to stimulate interesting future netnographic service research.

This paper aims to investigate how actors in the farmer’s network influence the adoption of smart farming technology (SFT) and to understand how social media affects this adoption process, in particular focusing on the influence of social media on trust in knowledge dissemination within the network.

The methodology used a two-stage process, with semi-structured interviews of farmers, augmented by a netnographic approach appropriate to the social media context.

The analysis illustrates the key role of the farmer network in the dissemination of SFT knowledge, bringing insight into an important B2B context. While social media emerges as a valuable way to connect farmers and promote discussion, it remains underused in knowledge dissemination on SFT. Also, farmers exhibit more trust in the content from peers online rather than from SFT vendors.

Novel insights are gained into the influence of the farming network on the accelerated adoption of SFT, including the potential role of social media in mitigating the homophilous nature of peer-to-peer interactions among farmers through exposure to more diverse actors and information. The use of a social network theory lens has provided new insights into the role of trust in shaping social media influence on the farmer, with variances in farmer trust of information from technology vendors and from peers.

This paper aims to distil the management challenge pertaining to B2B SME branding strategy, communication and constraint in the emerging market context of Chinese manufacturing.

Complemented by 19 interviews, this paper adopted a novel methodological approach – netnographic analysis – to investigate a selection of Chinese manufacturing SMEs.

Findings revealed three managerial approaches to B2B brand management: conservative, flexible and integrated-exploratory.

Understanding the three approaches offers managerial implications for Chinese manufacturer SMEs to redesign their branding practice. Informed with a better understanding of the available option, they will be able to achieve high value-added production through branding to gain competitiveness. This study sheds light on B2B SME branding from an emerging market perspective, an area that has been largely neglected in the existing literature.

Findings make a novel contribution to B2B SME brand management literature by clarifying practical management issues pertinent to Chinese emerging market manufacturers in particular, and offering widely generalizable lessons for B2B brand management research.

This paper presents an in-depth investigation on how brands may concur to the co-creation of consumers’ experiences. In particular, the purpose of this paper is to clarify the main types of co-created experiences that consumers may encounter as a result of social media brand communities.

To identify the main types of co-created experiences, a digital investigation has been used as the main method of analysis. The authors draw their digital investigation on the digital methods paradigm.

Four principal types of co-created experiences have been identified and conceptualized, namely, brand’s products’ individual usage experiences, auto-celebrative experiences, brand’s products’ communal usage experiences and collective celebration experiences.

Results stress the importance for brand strategists to involve members of social media brand communities to stimulate co-creation experiences. Specifically, it emerges that the simultaneous interaction among members of the community and the brand may directly affect co-creation experiences.

La presente investigación se propone analizar en profundidad cómo las marcas pueden estar de acuerdo con la co-creación de las experiencias de los consumidores. En particular, el objetivo de la investigación es aclarar cuáles son los principales tipos de experiencias co-creadas que los consumidores pueden experimentar debido a su participación en las comunidades de marcas de redes sociales.

Para hacerlo, en primer lugar, se han identificado los factores que influyen en la co-creación de las experiencias de los miembros de las comunidades de marcas. En particular, el punto de partida de esta investigación está representado por el papel de otros consumidores y de la marca en la co-creación de experiencias. Con el fin de identificar los principales tipos de experiencias co-creadas, se ha utilizado una investigación digital como el principal método de análisis. Dibujamos nuestra investigación digital en el paradigma de Métodos Digitales.

Se identificaron y conceptualizaron cuatro tipos principales de experiencias co-creadas.

Los resultados enfatizan la importancia de que los estrategas de marca involucren a los miembros de las comunidades de marcas de medios sociales para estimular la co-creación de experiencias. Específicamente, surgió cómo la interacción simultánea de otros miembros de la comunidad y la marca puede afectar la co-creación.

Co-creación de valor, Comunidades de marca, Experiencias de los consumidores, Experiencias co-creadas, Investigación digital, Marketing experiencial

This paper aims to develop a theoretical framework for the conceptualization of customer experiential knowledge (CEK) by logically combining its different dimensions into one coherent explanatory concept. Drawing on the integration of the literature on customer experience, customer knowledge management and customer insights acquisition, supported by adequate empirical evidence, the framework provides a systematic, comprehensive and accurate understanding of CEK which, could contribute to the identification of relevant customer experience insights useful for customer knowledge management.

The analysis follows an inductive/deductive interpretative approach and it is based on a netnography of specialty coffee bloggers’ narratives in relation to their sustainability practices.

The paper identifies the following six types of CEK: normative, subcultural, epicurean, transcendental, subcultural and symbolic. Accordingly, CEK is defined as the knowledge tacitly possessed by customers in relation to how they live their consumption experiences according to a body of heterogeneous socio-cultural contextual factors (ethos, norms and symbols) and subjective influences (emotions, ingenuity, instincts and senses) deeply embedded into the narrative of a consumption experience.

While CEK has been largely observed and acknowledged, it has not been yet adequately addressed by existing research. The provision of a conceptual definition of CEK which emphasizes its different dimensions will be of use to both academics and practitioners to better identify and categorize the different manifestations of CEK when undertaking empirical observations or managerial decisions.

Loneliness and isolation are on the rise, globally threatening the well-being across age groups; global social distancing measures during the COVID-19 crisis have intensified this so-called “loneliness virus”. The purpose of this paper is to develop an integrative framework and research agenda on the role of companion robots in mitigating feelings of loneliness.

A netnographic analysis of 595 online visual and textual descriptions offer empirical insights about the role of the companion robot Vector during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The contributions of this study are twofold. First, it postulates that companion robots have the potential of mitigating feelings of loneliness (i.e. indicator of well-being). Second, this study contributes to transformative service by developing an integrative framework introducing the roles (personal assistant, relational peer and intimate buddy) that companion robots can fulfill to mitigate feelings of loneliness through building different types of supportive relationships.

The proposed research agenda encourages future service scholars to investigate 1) the role of robots in addressing loneliness, 2) design features that drive adoption of robots, 3) social support for different groups, 4) the operationalization and the measurement of loneliness and 5) an impact analysis of companion robots.

Service providers and policy makers can leverage the insights about how companion robots can help reduce a sense of loneliness.

The integrative framework on loneliness reduction, based on 595 unprompted online contributions issued during the COVID-19 pandemic, offers initial evidence for the impact of companion robots in reducing people's feelings of loneliness.

The paper explores the emergence of smart city governance with a particular focus on the cognitive value of the new technologies and the different accountabilities emerging in the digital infrastructures attempting to visualize and rationalize urban dynamics.

Drawing on ethnographic, netnographic and interview data from an empirical case study of the Smart and Wise City Turku spearhead project, the study builds on the assumption that smart cities emerge from the interaction between the characteristics of technologies, constellations of actors and contextual conditions.

The results report smart city activities as an organizational process and a reconfiguration that incorporates new technology with old infrastructure. Through the lens of the empirical examples, we are able to show how smart city actors, boundaries and infrastructures are mobilized, become valuable and are rendered visible. The smart cities infrastructure traces, values and governs actors, identities, objects, ideas and relations to animate new desires and feats of imagination.

In terms of implications to practice, the situated descriptions echo recent calls to leaders and managers to ask how much traceability is enough (Power, 2019) and limits of accountability (Messner, 2009).

The central theoretical concept of “thinking infrastructure” highlights how new accounting practices operate by disclosing (Kornberger et al., 2017) new worlds where the platforms and the users discover the nature of their responsibilities to the other. The contribution of this paper is that it examines what happens when smartness is understood as a thinking infrastructure. Different theorizations of infrastructure have implications for the study of smart cities. The lens helps us grasp possible tensions and consequences in terms of accountability that arise from new forms of participation in smart cities. It helps urban governance scholarship understand how smartness informs and shapes distributed and embodied cognition.

The aim of this research is to identify the characteristics that give rise to motivations to use social apps in light of behavioral concepts related to consumers’ desires and emotional values.

Netnography is used as the main methodology to analyze and categorize user profiles of online social networks. These profiles are presented through conceptual headlines, which highlight the main characteristics of each user group.

The results of the study show that many users have become dependent on the WhatsApp application, either for technological reasons or for social reasons related to fashion and status.

Few consumers actually explained the ways they use mobile social networks in the context of the procedures and level of communication performed. However, the influence of social contexts in the consumer environment is changing perceived values focusing on prestige and status to technological elements that the majority of consumers use.

Practical implications are directly related to forming business connections in a less formal and more hedonic environment, improving market results while fostering user enjoyment. In addition, the ongoing updates to WhatsApp have brought new functionalities and improvements to previously weak features.

Although other applications offer means by which to talk and send messages, WhatsApp continues to be (as of early 2021) the most used platform for conversation in Brazil. The sovereignty of WhatsApp is directly linked to its social value, which is related to the number of consumers who daily interact via the network.

Based on initial observation, this paper aims to explore the current practices of collaborative knowledge sharing (KS) between North West Universities and highlight new avenues of future relevant research.

A netnographic observation was conducted to unveil the current practices of KS between North West Universities.

The paper concludes that there is little or no evidence of collaborative KS practices amongst North West Universities in response to the present Covid-19 transition.

This paper provides useful, practical insight that may assist decision-makers to establish KS initiatives within North West Universities and beyond. A strategy is also proposed to nurture collaborative KS amongst North West Universities and within wider work-applied management practice.

This paper presents an unconventional conceptualisation of KS practices amid the present Covid-19 pandemic with the fresh perspective of North West England Universities.

Sports leagues have stood out in the entertainment industry due to their great economic value and cultural impact. This is the case of the American sports leagues, with emphasis on the National Basketball Association (NBA), whose largest Latin American market lies on Brazil. The aforementioned league’s audience is constantly growing, a fact that can be partially explained by the encouragement provided for its viewers to interact through social media, in a phenomenon called social TV. Accordingly, the aim of the present study is to investigate how social TV works as a means for Brazilian fans to coproduce their NBA broadcasting enjoyment through social media interactions.

The authors conducted a netnography on the community of fans engaged in Twitter hashtag #NBAnaESPN, which was released by ESPN to promote audience integration during NBA games' broadcasting.

A theorization about the role played by social TV in the way fan culture articulates through social media to enjoy broadcasting media products was herein presented. The findings of this study have evidenced three categories concerning the role played by television broadcasting, social media and the fandom in NBA consumption by Brazilian fans. Based on these findings, the authors got to the conclusion that social TV establishes a mediatized environment where fan culture can be articulated through social media to enable interactions about television broadcasting.

The study was limited to members of the Brazilian NBA audience who engage in the official social media of the league’s broadcasting.

The study heads toward a theoretical generalization based on the research results.