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In their work on ‘online consumer stewards’ in E-sports, the authors point to the competing social and commercial imperatives that govern behaviour and who can be seen as ‘authentic’ in a fast-paced digital environment. Drawing on insights from Bauman’s work on ‘liquidity’ they explore the case of Starcraft II, a global, multi-player online game, and show how the most successful stewards need to be both adaptable and free-floating whilst at the same time anchored in solid community structures. The most successful of these stewards are then able to leverage this (perceived) authenticity to meet both community and commercial objectives.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to explore the orientations of consumer and company participants who participate in online crowd-sourced communities.

Methodology/Approach – Using a netnographic approach, we analysed the Nokia Design by Community (NDbC) crowd-sourced information contest, which was organised by Nokia in order to co-create a vision of the community's ‘dream’ Nokia device.

Findings – The findings reveal that community members' social orientations were dramatically different from the host organisation's narrow commercial focus, which led to unresolved tensions and as we posit, the ultimate failure of the initiative.

Research implications – The contemporary discourse on collaborative value co-creation potentially overemphasises the commercial objectives of organisations by failing to acknowledge the need for organisations to address the complex communal objectives and motivations of members of crowd-sourced communities.

Practical implications – Organisations need to acknowledge and address the complex and dynamic communal and commercial tensions that inherently emerge in online crowd-sourced communities. They need to adopt a tribal marketing approach and respectfully engage with community members if the diverse objectives of community members and the host organisations are to be satisfactorily met.

Originality/Value – Organisations and researchers need to recognise and acknowledge that crowdsourcing both begets communal conflict and fosters collaborative behaviour due to contested commercial and social orientations. While mindful of their commercial objectives, organisations will succeed in implementing online crowd-sourcing initiatives if they make a sincere effort to understand and respect the diversity, culture and social norms of the particular crowd-sourced online community concerned.

In order to understand how specific communities might develop over time, it is important to take into account how the broader phenomenon of online consumer communities is itself situated in a bigger social context. As a whole, online communities can be seen as micro-social groups (Maffesoli, 1996) that exist at the “forgotten” level in consumer research (Bagozzi, 2000). This micro-social level, between individual and macro/cultural levels, is the level at which interactions and communications between people take place (Cova & Cova, 2002).

This article reviews the quantitative marketing literature on artificial intelligence (AI) through an economics lens. We apply the framework in Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence to systematically categorize 96 research papers on AI in marketing academia into five levels of impact, which are prediction, decision, tool, strategy, and society. For each paper, we further identify each individual component of a task, the research question, the AI model used, and the broad decision type. Overall, we find there are fewer marketing papers focusing on strategy and society, and accordingly, we discuss future research opportunities in those areas.

With the growth of the internet, more attention is being paid to new uses of the internet. This study examines loyalty to ‘virtual communities’ that internet users participate in. A research model is developed to describe the relationship between website evaluation factors and virtual community loyalty. Results are consistent with the predictions of the model.

The objective of this chapter is to interpret a supply chain as an ontological entity with being-in-the-world of spacetimemattering. A case study approach is adopted to reveal the strategies undertaken by one of China’s fastest growing Internet companies – Xiaomi Inc. – to create competitive advantage through its management of product design and supply chain integration. Utilizing publicly available data, we analyze the company with quantum storytelling and network analysis techniques. Our analysis concludes that Xiaomi’s success originates from two aspects. First, Xiaomi is a good storyteller, who makes stories appealing to customers by involving them into product design and branding. Second, Xiaomi’s parsimonious supply chain substantially improves its market responsiveness and reduces disruption risks; more importantly, it helps to offer products of great value to customers.