scholarly journals Virtual Community Engagement on Facebook Brand Page

Author(s):  
Zhang Jing ◽  
Heang Sotheara ◽  
Mom Virak

The behavior of consumers in virtual community varies according to the types of the community they feel belonged to. The study may not only be conducted to understand what drives consumers to participate in the virtual brand community but may also seek to understand how members could get themselves with the community. The finding indicates that hedonic benefit is the strongest stimulus, which links to higher engagement. Though economic motive and product learning are not found to have a significant effect on sharing and commenting behavior; they are considered inherent. From theoretical contribution, the papers also provide strategic marketing directions to promote virtual community engagement.

10.28945/4536 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 065-090
Author(s):  
Haili Pan

Aim/Purpose: This study examines the kind of community value companies should provide when strengthening the relationship between customers and brands through the establishment of an online brand community, and how this kind of community value promotes customers’ sense of community engagement and willingness to spread brand reputation. The paper also discusses how an enterprise’s brand symbolism affects the relationship between community value and customers’ engagement in online brand community. This study explored the important role of brand symbolism in the establishment of an online brand community. Background: Many companies want to create online brand communities to strengthen their relationships with consumers as well as to provide better service and value to consumers, for example, Huawei’s Huafen community (club.huawei.com), Apple’s support community (support.apple.com/zh-cn), and Samsung’s Galaxy community (samsungmembers.cn). However, these brand communities may have different interests and consumer engagement about the kind of community value to offer to their customers. Methodology: This study uses data collection from questionnaire surveys to design a quantitative research method. An online questionnaire survey of mobile phone users in China was conducted to collect data on social value, cognitive value, brand symbolism, customer community engagement, and brand recommendation. The brands of mobile phone include Apple, Huawei, Samsung, OPPO, VIVO, MI, and Meizu. The researcher purchased a sample service of WJX, an online survey company (www.wjx.cn), and WJX company distributed the questionnaire to research participants. The WJX company randomly selected 240 subjects from their sample database and then sent the questionnaire link to research participants’ mobile phones. Among the 240 research participants, the researcher excluded participants who lacked online brand community experience or had invalid data to qualify for data collection. After the researcher excluded participants who did not qualify for data collection, only 203 qualified questionnaire surveys advanced to the data collection and analysis phase, which was the questionnaire recovery rate of 84.58%. For the model analysis and hypotheses testing, the researcher used statistical software IBM SPSS Statistics and AMOS 21 and Smartpls3. Contribution: This study deepens the body of literature knowledge by combining online brand community value and brand symbolic value to explore issues that companies should consider when establishing an online brand community for their products and services. This study confirms that brands with high symbolic value establish communities and strengthen social values in the online brand community rather than reducing brand symbolism. Online brand community involves a horizontal interaction (peer interaction) among peers, which can have an effect on the symbolic value of brand (social distance). Findings: First, online brand community value (both cognitive and social value) has a positive impact on customer community engagement. Second, customer community engagement has a positive impact on customers’ brand recommend intention. Third, the customer community engagement is a mediator between the online brand community value and the customer brand recommend intention. Most importantly, fourth, the symbolic value of the brand controls the relationship between community value and customer community engagement. For brands with high symbolic value, the community value should emphasize cognitive value rather than social value. For brands with a low symbolic value, the community provides cognitive or social value, which is not affected by the symbolism of the brand. Recommendations for Practitioners: Practitioners can share best practices with the corporate sectors. Brand owners can work with researchers to explore the characteristics of their online brand communities. On this basis, brand owners and researchers can jointly build and manage online brand communities. Recommendation for Researchers: Researchers can explore different perspectives and factors of brand symbolism that involve brand owners when establishing an online brand community to advance consumer engagement, community value, and brand symbolism. Impact on Society: Online brand community is relevant for brand owners to establish brand symbolism, community value, and customer engagement. Readers of this paper can gain an understanding that cognitive and social values are two important drivers of individual participation in online brand communities. The discussion of these two factors can give readers and brand owners the perception to gain more understanding on social and behavior activities in online brand communities. Future Research: Practitioners and researchers could follow-up in the future with a study to provide more understanding and updated research information from different perspectives of research samples and hypotheses on online brand community.


Author(s):  
Priyanka Bhardwaj ◽  
Rohit Singh Adhikari ◽  
Vandana Ahuja

This paper attempts to take a dive into the Facebook marketing approaches and tactics of Dominos India. With this paper, there has been an effort to analyse the content at the Facebook page of Dominos, while trying to figure out which kind of content was able to build more relationship with the consumers on the basis of number of likes, shares and comments. A relationship between the aforementioned variables has also been established using the Pearson Correlation Coefficient. Also, a simple linear regression model has been applied to these variables to further prove on this relationship in order to attest to the fact that more posts on the Facebook page result in higher traffic and better engagement. Facebook marketing is about indulging in quality interactions with the consumers and then tapping their sentiments. An online brand community can be built to engage with consumers and brands thus have an opportunity to exploit the potential of social media. A brand community is a non-geographical, virtual community pertaining to a brand built on the foundations of the social relations among the various stakeholders/admirers of the brand. To develop a brand community the companies create a page on Facebook concerning a particular brand. The advantage of such a community is that not only it leverages a wider reach for a particular brand but it also lets all the members build connections around the brand. Here, the freely expressed opinion of individuals can be recorded and the results can be quantified to gauge changes over time. Analysis on the gathered data can be done using various analytical tools.


2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Matti Haverila ◽  
Caitlin McLaughlin ◽  
Kai Christian Haverila ◽  
Julio Viskovics

PurposeThe purpose of this research is to compare two different sample populations (student and general) to determine the impact of brand community motives on brand community engagement.Design/methodology/approachTwo samples were drawn for the purpose of the current research. The first sample was drawn among the members of various brand communities from a general North American population sample (N = 503). The second sample was drawn purely from students, belonging to a variety of brand communities, from a middle-sized Canadian university (N = 195). Partial least squares structural equation modelling was used to analyse the strength, significance and effect sizes of the relationships between brand community motive and engagement constructs.FindingsThe findings indicate that the impact of brand community motives varied by sample population. The information and entertainment motives were significantly related to brand community engagement in both sample populations with roughly equal effect sizes. The social integration motive was again significantly related to the brand community engagement construct in the student sample population – but not for the general North American general population sample. Further, the self-discovery motive and status enhancement motives were significantly related to brand community engagement in the North American sample, but not for the student sample. This indicates significant differences between the two sample populations.Originality/valueThe results of the current research demonstrate that student populations are significantly different from the general population regarding their motives towards brand communities. This indicates that brand community managers need to be aware of the motives of different brand community members and also that they need to exercise caution about utilizing purely student data to make decisions about brand community management.


2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Junyun Liao ◽  
Xuebing Dong ◽  
Ziwei Luo ◽  
Rui Guo

Purpose Oppositional loyalty toward rival brands is prevalent. Although its antecedents have increasingly received scholarly attention, the literature is rather disparate. Based on identity theory, this study aims to propose that oppositional loyalty is a brand identity-driven outcome and provides a unified framework for understanding the formation and activation of brand identity in influencing oppositional loyalty. Design/methodology/approach Structural equation modeling was used to test the theoretical framework based on an online survey of 329 brand community members. Multigroup analysis was used to test the moderating effect of inter-consumer brand rivalry and brand community engagement. Findings The results show that self-brand similarity, brand prestige and brand uniqueness lead to consumers’ brand identity (i.e. consumer-brand identification), which, in turn, facilitates oppositional loyalty. Furthermore, the results indicate that inter-consumer brand rivalry and brand community engagement are identity-salient situations that strengthen the relationship between consumer-brand identification and oppositional loyalty. Practical implications Identity has great power in shaping consumer behaviors. Fostering consumer-brand identification is critical for firms to prevent consumers from switching to competing brands. Inter-consumer brand rivalry and brand community engagement can help firms consolidate their customer base by evoking consumers’ brand identity. Originality/value This investigation makes theoretical contributions by providing a unified theoretical framework to model the development of oppositional loyalty based on identity theory.


Author(s):  
Muhammed Alnsour ◽  
Hadeel Rakan Al Faour

The purpose of this article is to study the relationships between brand community engagement of customers on social media networks and customer behavioral intentions with regard to visiting restaurants where the theory of planned behavior was applied. A conclusive-descriptive, cross-sectional research design was selected in order to determine the degree to which Brand Community Engagement, Attitude (ATT), Subjective Norms (SN), Perceived Behavioral Control (PBC), Restaurant's Visit Intentions (INT) and Visit Behavior (B) are interrelated and associated. The results indicated that BCE does affect customers attitude towards dining out and visiting restaurants and that SN cannot moderate the strong relationship between ATT and intention. In addition, customer intention can weakly predict their behavior of visiting restaurants. The results of this study suggest that management of restaurants should pay attention to their marketing communication strategies through social media restaurant's communities and should focus on how to increase the engagement levels of customers beside understanding and may be changing their attitudes towards experiences in restaurants. This study examined the relationship between Restaurants Brand Community Engagement on social media and customer intentions to dine out and visit restaurants.


2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 1508543 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra Maria Correia Loureiro ◽  
Hans Rüdiger Kaufmann ◽  
Scott Weaven

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (7) ◽  
pp. 5167-5170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chai Ching Tan ◽  
Patthracholakorn Apisit-Isariyah

2016 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 298-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
Minjung Kang ◽  
Dong-Hee Shin

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine how types of virtual brand community (VBC) benefits influence VBC loyalty through specific types of interaction. Design/methodology/approach – The study targeted 250 brand community users to conduct an empirical analysis using SPSS 19.0. Findings – Consumers’ perceived benefits (functional, experiential, and symbolic) were found to be the leading variables in inducing consumer loyalty. Brand community managers should not focus only on the benefits offered by the brand community, but also on how these benefits can be associated with human-to-computer and consumer-to-consumer (C2C) interaction. Research limitations/implications – The virtual community (VC) has an important role as a marketing tool. As the VC within the virtual space has gradually been increasing, its importance has grown as well, therefore making research studies on heightening members’ brand community site loyalty important. Originality/value – This study broadens and contextualizes our understanding of what type of VBC interaction can be further activated in the process of enhancing the members’ VBC loyalty, which is affected by consumers’ perceived benefits.


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