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This study aims to present a general overview of the characteristics of virtual communities hosted by apparel retailers.

Content analysis was conducted on 2,521 web sites hosted by apparel retailers. Web sites of apparel retailers were identified from Stores Magazine “top 100 specialty retailers” and “top 100 retailers” listings, and Google search engine directory. Web sites were analyzed in terms of general characteristics of apparel retailers (e.g. apparel product categories, ability to purchase online, presence of brick‐and‐mortar stores). Two coders individually visited each web site and coded the contents.

A total of 13 virtual communities hosted by apparel retailers were found. Apparel retailers selling casual merchandise to the young teen market had the strongest representation. Most of the virtual communities used bulletin or message board tools. About half of the virtual communities had registration requirements and rules or membership policies. Discussion topics of community members varied.

The small percentage of apparel retailers hosting virtual communities indicates that more evidence is needed to make it a compelling case for retailers to host virtual communities. Virtual communities may be of value to marketers for consumer research and feedback.

This paper examines virtual communities of consumption hosted by companies that sell apparel products.

With the advent of the internet café, chat sessions, instant messengers, special interest e‐groups and now blogs, people do not need to be physically close together to exchange their ideas. The participants can have shared experiences that are instantaneous and pretty much of the same nature that is usually realized by the traditional collection of special interest people in close proximity. The members of these virtual communities share their knowledge, cooperate with each other to solve problems, and feel responsibility for each other. Internet based technologies have been the great enablers of virtual communities. In the high‐involvement healthcare sector, patients are increasingly seeking online advice and information by participating in virtual communities. The purpose of this paper is to understand the process of consumer value creation in virtual communities.

This paper first adopts Cothrel's framework for the creation of value in virtual communities followed by an application of Kozinets' segmentation model of online consumers to explore the process of consumer value creation by a healthcare virtual community. “Netnography” was used as the research technique for this study. Netnography is an ethnographic research method adapted to the online environment. Discourse analysis is applied to interpret the huge volume of online postings.

The paper identifies four segments of virtual community users – tourists, minglers, devotees, and insiders, and studies their online activities and discussion topics to demonstrate their differential roles as members of healthcare virtual communities.

Most of the earlier works that are focused on virtual communities have been conducted at the conceptual level. In this paper a priori user segments in healthcare virtual communities are empirically profiled. Based on the findings, managerial implications for healthcare virtual communities are formulated.

Focuses on the exploration of consumer experience and attitudes towards online interaction within virtual communities. One of the emerging e‐commerce business models, the consumer to consumer “community” model, is relatively new but underpins the framework for the research conducted. The dramatic change in terms of how consumers interact with each other and potentially engage with direct marketers is epitomised by a change in the level of perceived control with a shift towards consumer‐controlled interaction. The growth in virtual or on‐line communities is part of this evolution, and this paper reports on the qualitative phase of an ESF/DMA‐funded research project.

Drawing from recent work on online social networking and communities of consumption, the purpose of this paper is to explore, identify, and postulate key factors facilitating the growth and success of marketing in virtual worlds.

An empirical study was conducted employing netnographic evidence from three different virtual worlds and related user‐generated blog discussions.

The findings suggest mechanisms which enable virtual worlds to gain and maintain the interest of their users and therefore underlie successful marketer practices.

This is an exploratory study based on qualitative and ethnographic online research methods, and therefore the results are of a descriptive nature. The study was conducted to initiate the academic discourse about marketing in virtual worlds. As such, the paper believes that it can act as a reasonable starting‐point for future discussion.

The study suggests that traditional advertising has not proven to be a very effective way to exploit the special characteristics of virtual worlds. There is substantial potential in virtual worlds for new and innovative marketing methods that are highly engaging and take advantage of users' active role in virtual worlds. From the marketing point of view, virtual worlds can be especially used for connecting with customers, contributing to customer learning, and getting customer input.

The paper illustrates that virtual worlds have come to offer marketers new opportunities for engaging their customers into interactive and co‐productive marketplace exchanges. They uncover untapped potential, resources and creative means for building customer relationships.

The purpose of this study is to provide a better understanding of the virtual communities' phenomenon.

This paper reports a case study. It explains one of the most successful online strategies developed by a global brand, Coca‐Cola, in Spain.

This study has shown that a web site can act as a marketing tool to develop a group of loyal consumers around the brand. The strength of the Spanish strategy relies on the creation of a virtual community, which provides functional, social, and experiential values.

The paper analyses the evolution from off‐line communities to virtual communities. A uses and gratification approach is used to explain consumer participation in virtual communities. The paper offers some useful guidelines for the creation and maintenance of a virtual community.

Motivated by situational strength theory and multi-level theory, the purpose of this paper is to propose a cross-level model to examines whether virtual community citizenship behaviors (VCCBs) are affected by consumers’ individual differences on reciprocity, other consumers’ collective citizenship behaviors at community-level (members citizenship behaviors, MCBs), and their interaction effects.

The research model is tested with a sample of 340 consumers collected from the 34 virtual communities of consumptions (VCCs). Because consumers are embedded in communities, the authors employ the hierarchical linear modeling for data analyses.

The findings reveal positive effects of individual’s prosocial values and community-level MCBs, and a negative effect of exchange ideology, on VCCBs. There is a significant cross-level moderation effect of MCBs such that MCBs reduce the negative influence of exchange ideology on VCCBs.

This research suggests that participation in VCCs could be simultaneously driven by the dispositions to help and to get fair reciprocity, while such effects are constrained by others’ citizenship behaviors within the VCC. Future research should identify other contextual factors that could confine or amplify the personality-behavior links in the context of VCCs.

Managers who intend to build a VCC of high co-creation should establish mechanisms that could facilitate norm of VCCBs. Also, it is crucial to take into account the participants’ dispositions on reciprocity in recruiting community members and developing member portfolio.

This is one of the first studies to offer insights regarding the role of community-level citizenship behavior as a strong situation to mitigating the influences of individuals’ reciprocity-based dispositions.

By doing sentiment analysis of netnographic data, this study aims to explain the need to give special attention to negative sentiments expressed in virtual tribes, as they play a significant role in translating the informational mode of conversation to the relational mode of conversation. The overall purpose is to aid brand managers in the process of brand co-creation by articulating brand communication targeted to specific audiences based on their shared passions and interests.

The study adopts a mixed-methods approach. The primary data were collected from two virtual brand communities through qualitative net-based ethnographic methods. Semantria Excel plug-in was used to categorize the extracted consumer statements based on positive, neutral and negative sentiments.

Managing the negative interactions in the virtual communities and relationship development with members through non-commercial conversations should be the two main priorities for effective brand management. Sentiment analysis specifically helps to identify pain points and consumer sentiments at each stage of the shopper journey. The findings of the study endorse the importance of offering and supporting communities as a valid marketing.

This paper shows how systematic attention to user interactions on virtual brand communities can be used for tribal marketing, which in turn will impact the intangible aspects of the business, such as increasing brand value and loyalty. By engaging the consumers, the social ties among the target audience can be nurtured and strengthened.

This paper focuses on decoding their behavior by unpeeling the consumer statements rather than tangible aspects of the business, such as sales of products or services. It contributes to development of a theoretical framework that outlines how the interactions in virtual brand communities can aid in formulating the functional and communicational strategies for a brand.

The majority of scholarly contributions in tourism social media have focused on assisting practitioners to optimize online platforms or to describe the digital behavior of prospective individual tourists. These studies are dominated by mechanistic ontological frameworks, which take little notice of the inherently social nature of tourism consumption. Acknowledging the sociality of Web 2.0 communications, this chapter explores the potentials of an alternative analytical framework informed by symbolic convergence theory. The linkages between tourism social media, virtual communities, and symbolic convergence processes are illustrated by examples of postings taking place on the Facebook fan site of Roskilde festival. These examples highlight the significance of symbolic communities in shaping the visitor experience against the backdrop of contemporary consumer culture.

The paper aims to explore the structure of both normative and informational consumer conformity in an online virtual community. The purpose of this paper is to develop and test a conceptual model of e‐formity in virtual communities.

Data were collected online from consumers who belonged to at least one virtual community. A total of 2,000 customers were drawn from a list of online consumer panels maintained by an online research company. Overall, 14.8 percent of those invited replied to the survey and were analyzed with structure equation modelling.

The results from the analysis indicate that both dimensions of conformity are distinct and have separate antecedents. Normative consumer conformity is influenced by internal consumer characteristics, whereas informational consumer conformity is related to external virtual community characteristics.

Although this paper found evidence for e‐formity, the full nature and scope of e‐formity must be held to the classic findings of experimental versions of conformity research. There are broad implications for e‐formity in consumer behaviour and retailing. Retailers or manufacturers must realize that virtual communities and consumers' e‐formity behaviour are a valuable source of helping or hurting the sale and promotion of their products.

At the very least, the influence of e‐formity suggests that it is crucial for them to monitor closely the purposeful and nonpurposeful influences these virtual communications may have.

Given the scarcity of literature in the online conformity research area, this paper shows conformity in virtual communities does not change its influences on consumers' behaviour. As in the studies of traditional communities, e‐formity has found influence on virtual communities within two aspects. Virtual communities not only have inherited the social functions of traditional communities, but also have differences in antecedents.

Virtual communities are increasing in popularity and changing the way apparel fashion information is learned and shared by consumers. According to Agins, consumers, as opposed to élite designers, are now dictating fashion trends and pinpointing the ideal places of distribution. The purpose of this exploratory study is to examine the fashion‐related discussion which is taking place on perhaps the best known of these communities, MySpace.com. The three research questions driving this study include: “What are consumers saying about fashion within this particular virtual community?”; “What commonalities exist among the plethora of fashion‐related information available in this context?”; and “What kinds of insights can marketers draw from the categories of fashion‐related information being presented in MySpace.com?”

Content analysis was selected as the method for investigation. Within the forum Fashion and Style, the subgroup FashionLOVERS was selected for investigation because it represented a general discussion of fashion. The first 200 forum topical areas with five or more posts were selected for analysis. A total of 6,623 individual posts were examined and each of the three authors independently reviewed the posts noting the general topical categories of content. Interrater reliability for the coders was computed.

Eight recurring categories of fashion related information were identified in the study. The four most popular discussion categories were personal style, brands and designers, tips and advice, and retailers. The prevalence of these four topics suggests that consumer driven marketing is a growing and influential component of fashion marketing.

This study makes an important contribution to the study of virtual communities. Results provide insight into the complex, multi‐layered, interactive fashion‐related communication that occurs within virtual communities.

Fashion marketers and retailers are encountering an untapped resource with these virtual communities. Findings highlight the power of consumers in virtual communities and suggest a need for fashion marketers and retailers to closely monitor communication within virtual communities.

This research is particularly valuable because it provides insight into the popular virtual community, MySpace.com. Detailed investigation into types of fashion information that are shared with community members is presented and discussed.