Self-expressive Roles of Family Restaurant Brands: Brand Personality-Self Image Congruence, Brand Identification, and Loyalty

In the past decade, emotional branding has been emerged as an extremely influential brand management paradigm and is widely heralded as a key dimension to marketing success. Branding of emotions focuses upon the consumer and not the product at the very forefront; it examines how brands can communicate with consumers in a more rational and humanitarian manner and affect people deeply at the varying degree of the feelings and senses. Due to the steadily growing competition in the international market, brands have become an important component. Therefore, the objective of marketers is to understand the people's emotional desires and increase the consonance of the brand personality for their brands with the self-image of their target customers. The purpose of the chapter is to recognize the potential nature of emotions in creating strong brand attachments between consumers and brands, and promote active participation as it leads to customer loyalty. It also articulates the effects of interactive features that enhance emotional branding elements in a virtual community.

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Online service or virtual community? Building platform loyalty in reward-based crowdfunding

Internet Research ◽

10.1108/intr-06-2019-0256 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽

Author(s):

Sunghan Ryu ◽

Ayoung Suh

Keyword(s):

Sense Of Belonging ◽

Virtual Community ◽

Theoretical Background ◽

Service Satisfaction ◽

Content Type ◽

Individual Level ◽

Performance Variables ◽

Self Image ◽

Community Influences ◽

Image Congruence

PurposeThis study examines how individual contributors' evaluation of the two aspects in reward-based crowdfunding—service and community—influences the formation of platform loyalty. It also seeks to determine the conditions under which the evaluation is positive.Design/methodology/approachWe collaborated for data collection with two reward-based crowdfunding platforms in South Korea that primarily promote crowdfunding campaigns in the creative domains. We combined the survey data collected from 578 contributors and campaign data from the platforms, empirically examining the formation of platform loyalty and its antecedents.FindingsThe results suggest that service satisfaction with a platform and a sense of belonging to it are positively associated with platform loyalty. We also found that an individual contributor's self-image congruence with the crowdfunding platform is positively associated with service satisfaction and a sense of belonging, while the experience of greater campaign success moderates the relationship in different ways.Research limitations/implicationsThis study contributes to the crowdfunding literature by establishing a theoretical background for understanding reward-based crowdfunding platforms, which combine service and community. It also extends the scope of the literature on crowdfunding by examining the role of platform loyalty at the platform level.Practical implicationsThe results suggest that service and community are both critical for building a sustainable crowdfunding platform. Platform operators are expected to provide high-quality services and foster a sense of community. Identifying and developing contributors with higher self-image congruence with the platforms is essential.Originality/valueWhile previous literature on reward-based crowdfunding has focused on individual contributor- and campaign-level analyses, platform-level knowledge is lacking. This study is among the first to focus on platform loyalty of individual contributors toward reward-based crowdfunding platforms. Moreover, we use both individual-level perception and campaign-level performance variables to examine the formation of platform loyalty.

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