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1 – 10 of over 1000Jitpisut Bubphapant and Amélia Brandão
This paper aims to bridge the gap by understanding the context of ageing consumer behaviour in the online community. Specifically, this research seeks to identify which content…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to bridge the gap by understanding the context of ageing consumer behaviour in the online community. Specifically, this research seeks to identify which content typologies are critical to generating high engagement levels and, consequently, online brand advocacy and to understand the underlying motivation behind consumer online engagement.
Design/methodology/approach
A netnographic approach was used to comprehensively analyse older consumers’ online communities on Facebook, namely, “Silversurfers”. A total of 3,991 posts were included in the study and analysed using a content analysis approach over two years, from 2020 to 2022.
Findings
Results revealed that photography is the most active media type among older consumers. This study extends the literature on content marketing, identifying 17 new content types that reflect the four motivation states of older consumers to engage with the online community: cognitive/informative oriented, affective/emotional oriented, co-creation/interactive oriented and nostalgic oriented. Moreover, this investigation stressed affective/emotional oriented and nostalgic oriented as the primary motivations for higher engagement levels.
Originality/value
The older population is growing, which makes the ageing market potentially huge. However, more literature needs to address it, especially in online communities. Finally, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study develops an original content typology framework in which firms can consider implementing effective content typology strategies for the older consumer segment.
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Ruohong Hao, Xiaobei Liang and Hu Meng
As fertile soil for product promotion, online interest communities have gradually come into brands' view. However, existing research does not clarify whether brand engagement in…
Abstract
Purpose
As fertile soil for product promotion, online interest communities have gradually come into brands' view. However, existing research does not clarify whether brand engagement in consumer interaction is beneficial to the development of online interest communities. This study attempts to investigate the effects of brand engagement on the online interest community operation.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors propose a model that delineated the influence of brand engagement on consumers' citizenship behavior in the online interest community from the commitment-trust perspective. Scenario-based experiments were conducted and 536 data were collected by simple random sampling.
Findings
Results shows that a stronger perception of brand engagement has a positive influence on the relationship (trust and commitment) between the community and its users, which further influences online community citizenship behavior (feedback, advocacy and tolerance) of both posters and lurkers, especially for the posters. Although relationships are more complex, brand engagement activates the development of online interest communities to some extent.
Originality/value
This original study contributes to the commitment-trust theory by examining the impact of brand engagement on citizenship behavior via community commitment and trust in the online interest community context. In addition, this study compares the moderating effect of posters vs lurkers on the relationship between brand engagement and citizenship behavior in the online interest community.
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This study explores the creation of online brand relationships from the personal, social and brand perspectives of social media and its influence on the community citizenship…
Abstract
Purpose
This study explores the creation of online brand relationships from the personal, social and brand perspectives of social media and its influence on the community citizenship behavior to establish an integrative model. With social identity theory (SIT) and the theory of socially shared cognition (TSSC) as the theoretical basis for model integration, this study identifies the key factors that maintain the relationship between online community members and brands and prompt brand members to establish a close emotional connection with the brand and generate community citizenship behavior for the brand.
Design/methodology/approach
This study examines community members who own products from luxury fashion brands (e.g. Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Hermès) and have followed the official Instagram account of the luxury fashion brand for at least 1 year, with a total of 582 valid samples. Structural equation modeling (SEM) is used to test the model.
Findings
All except for one of the hypotheses are supported, and the theoretical model exhibits acceptable goodness-of-fit. The strongest effect is that of brand community identification on affective brand commitment, followed by that of online co-creation on community citizenship behavior and that of brand commitment on community citizenship behavior.
Originality/value
SIT was used as the basis and extended to the TSSC to integrate the theoretical perspectives. This study identifies the online brand relationship between service providers and consumers, explores possible causes and consequences from multiple perspectives and proposes conclusions and practical management implications as references for marketing personnel.
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This paper aims to examine the open innovation engagement process in terms of how online community members create and share knowledge for open innovation and the consequences of…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to examine the open innovation engagement process in terms of how online community members create and share knowledge for open innovation and the consequences of engagement.
Design/methodology/approach
A mixed methods approach based on netnography (Study 1), qualitative interviews (Study 2) and surveys (Study 3) was adopted in three studies.
Findings
The results of Study 1 show that hotel brand community members actively create and share their knowledge by evaluating hotel policies, providing service suggestions and creating new service ideas. The results of Study 2 identified enjoyment and empowerment as major antecedents of the engagement and brand loyalty and a sense of brand community as major consequences. In Study 3, the relationships among them were quantitatively examined.
Research limitations/implications
This research provides empirical knowledge on online engagement and identifies the innovation value of online platforms. The research also provides knowledge on the engagement process for open innovation by online community members in terms of its antecedents and consequences. As a main limitation of the study, this research only focuses on a single online brand community.
Originality/value
While most existing tourism research analyzes the role of user-generated content in customer decision-making, this research provides a fresh insight into the innovation value of customer knowledge.
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Amit Rakesh Sethi, Satyabhusan Dash, Abhishek Mishra and Dianne Cyr
Online customer communities have become a strategic tool for business-to-business (B2B) firms to drive collaboration among customers around the company’s products and services…
Abstract
Purpose
Online customer communities have become a strategic tool for business-to-business (B2B) firms to drive collaboration among customers around the company’s products and services. This paper aims to argue that the three social capital dimensions, that is, structural, relational and cognitive, themselves driven by brand community trust, can affect brand loyalty for the organization.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors use a survey to collect data and structural equation modeling to test the conceptual framework by collecting data from 214 participants across three online B2B communities operated by three technology firms in India.
Findings
Brand community trust is found to have a strong association with social network ties, identification and norm of reciprocity and shared vision. These three have concomitant effects on the quality of customer-to-customer (C2C) interactions. Such communication generates functional, emotional and social benefits, which, in turn, curate brand loyalty.
Practical implications
The authors’ findings guide community managers in leveraging such conversations in shaping customer loyalty for the corporate brand.
Originality/value
This work provides an integrated framework to explain the important role of C2C interactions in B2B online brand communities.
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Noel Yee Man Siu, Tracy Junfeng Zhang and Raissa Sui-Ping Yeung
Drawing on conservation of resources theory, this study aims to investigate the impact of online customer engagement on brand love via dual mediating mechanisms, empowerment…
Abstract
Purpose
Drawing on conservation of resources theory, this study aims to investigate the impact of online customer engagement on brand love via dual mediating mechanisms, empowerment (bright side) and stress (dark side). The roles of perceived brand quality and extroversion as weakener and facilitator respectively on the dark side effect are also examined.
Design/methodology/approach
An online survey is conducted, targeting people who have experience in participating in online engagement activities. The dual mediation and moderation analysis are examined.
Findings
The results confirm the proposed dual mediating mechanisms. Perceived brand quality and extroversion also significantly moderate the engagement–stress link.
Research limitations/implications
This study explains the mediating mechanisms between online customer engagement and brand love, with a focus on the fast-moving consumer goods industry. This calls for further research on other industries.
Practical implications
This study provides marketers with insights that online customer engagement strategies are not always good and that they should be more careful in formulating such strategies.
Originality/value
This study advances the understanding of the relationship between customer engagement and brand love in the virtual community especially in the social media context.
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Min Prasad Bhandari, Charan Bhattarai and Gary Mulholland
This study aims to investigate the critical role of online brand community (OBC) engagement and brand evangelism: the role of age, gender and membership number.
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to investigate the critical role of online brand community (OBC) engagement and brand evangelism: the role of age, gender and membership number.
Design/methodology/approach
To achieve the study’s objective, 303 active Facebook OBC users were surveyed. The AMOS structural equation modelling (SEM) is used to test the hypothesised model.
Findings
The results indicate that OBC engagement improves brand evangelism. Specifically, the results show that age, gender, and OBC membership number moderate the relationship between OBC engagement and brand evangelism. Interestingly, this study found that female, younger and low-OBC follower consumers more significantly contribute to nourishing brand evangelism than male, older and high-OBC follower counterparts.
Originality/value
OBC engagement is validated as a key brand evangelism driver, further substantiating its role as a crucial strategic metric. Moreover, age, gender and OBC membership number as moderating factors in the association between OBC engagement and brand evangelism (word of mouth referral, brand defence and future purchases) have been verified. Although the findings suggest that improved OBC engagement contributes to evangelism, this effect transpires more significantly among female, younger and low-OBC followers than male, older and high-OBC followers.
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Ernest Emeka Izogo and Mercy Mpinganjira
Although digital content marketing (DCM) research and industry-wide expenditure is growing very rapidly owing to the positive outcomes associated with this new pull marketing…
Abstract
Purpose
Although digital content marketing (DCM) research and industry-wide expenditure is growing very rapidly owing to the positive outcomes associated with this new pull marketing strategy, research has not completely mapped how DCM activities can be optimized in the social media brand community context. This paper seeks to understand how social media DCM activities can be optimized to achieve greater relational and monetary outcomes for different products.
Design/methodology/approach
A structural equation modeling procedure was used to analyze 416 survey responses obtained from members of Facebook brand communities in South Africa.
Findings
The results reveal that social media DCM consumption motives exert significant differential effects on both relational and monetary marketing outcomes in search and experience product contexts while also demonstrating the mechanism through which social media DCM consumption motives lead to contributing social media engagement behaviors.
Practical implications
The study findings call for the need for firms to understand the motives that drive the consumption of DCM in social media brand communities. Specifically, marketers of search products should deploy more of hedonic contents such as images while simultaneously keeping highly textual DCM to a minimum in Facebook brand communities as this works better for experience products. Finally, more authentic SM-DCM activities that effectively address the authenticity SM-DCM consumption motive can result from the DCM activities of social media opinion leaders and genuine consumer–brand interactions in the context of Facebook brand communities.
Originality/value
This paper broke new grounds in three unique directions in terms of: (1) the relative salience of SM-DCM consumption motives in enhancing WTP and different aspects of SMBE; (2) the contextual influence of product type on SM-DCM activities optimization and (3) the mechanisms that underlie the effects of SM-DCM consumption motives on contributing SMBE in the Facebook brand community context.
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Xuejie Yang, Dongxiao Gu, Honglei Li, Changyong Liang, Hemant K. Jain and Peipei Li
This study aims to investigate the process of developing loyalty in the Chinese mobile health community from the information seeking perspective.
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to investigate the process of developing loyalty in the Chinese mobile health community from the information seeking perspective.
Design/methodology/approach
A covariance-based structural equation model was developed to explore the mobile health community loyalty development process from information seeking perspective and tested with LISREL 9.30 for the 191 mobile health platform user samples.
Findings
The empirical results demonstrate that the information seeking perspective offers an interesting explanation for the mobile health community loyalty development process. All hypotheses in the proposed research model are supported except the relationship between privacy and trust. The two types of mobile health community loyalty—attitudal loyalty and behavioral loyalty are explained with 58 and 37% variance.
Originality/value
This paper has brought out the information seeking perspective in the loyalty formation process in mobile health community and identified several important constructs for this perspective for the loyalty formation process including information quality, communication with doctors and communication with patients.
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Gaofu Liu, Haonan Yang and Jing Nie
Value co-creation is a new initiative for enterprises to form a competitive advantage, and user engagement is the basis for achieving value co-creation; nevertheless, few studies…
Abstract
Purpose
Value co-creation is a new initiative for enterprises to form a competitive advantage, and user engagement is the basis for achieving value co-creation; nevertheless, few studies have discussed the influence mechanisms of user engagement on value co-creation behavior. In this study, the authors aim to reveal the influence mechanisms of online fitness user engagement on value co-creation behavior by considering emotional resonance and immersive experience as mediating variables.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors proposed and empirically tested a research model based on a survey involving 461 Chinese respondents through partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM).
Findings
The results of this study confirm that consumer engagement, contributing engagement and social engagement are important drives of value co-creation behavior among online fitness users. Furthermore, emotional resonance and immersive experience have been revealed as important mediating mechanisms to explain why user engagement drives value co-creation behavior.
Practical implications
The results of this study suggest that practitioners need to focus on the social engagement and consumer engagement of users in online fitness communities and to provide the appropriate environment and conditions for online fitness user to achieve mutual value co-creation.
Originality/value
This study makes two main contributions. It examines user engagement in an online fitness community context and helps to understand its applicability in other contexts. It explains the influence mechanisms of online fitness user engagement on value co-creation behavior and enriches the studies related to the drivers of value co-creation behavior.
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