The authors develop and estimate a conceptual model of how different aspects of customers’ relationships with the brand community influence their intentions and behaviors. The authors describe how identification with the brand community leads to positive consequences, such as greater community engagement, and negative consequences, such as normative community pressure and (ultimately) reactance...

Building on the extant research on branding and social media, this study examines the nature of an online brand community as a B2B brand communication platform through netnographic analysis of the CISCO LinkedIn Group discussions. The empirical analysis yielded four distinct themes characterizing B2B brand communication within the online community that contribute to the existing theory: company...

This paper highlights some confusion in the marketing literature concerning virtual communities of consumers which are initiated by companies in their web sites. Some researches in Marketing tend, indeed, to design any community within the official Website of the brand as a B2C virtual brand community. However, the paper notes that the passion to the brand, which is an essential characteristic ...

Online brand communities reflect a shared interest among participants that sustains community identity around and through brand consumption. While exchanges within such a community are typically supportive, conflict can exist between different, and sometimes competing, brand communities. The phenomena of communities in conflict introduces an element of ‘other’ that allows each community to deli...

Proprietary brands are a major vehicle for producer profits: consumers have been shown willing to pay a considerable “brand premium” for a branded product over an otherwise identical unbranded product. Prior literature has implicitly assumed that only producers develop brands. In this paper, we report that user communities also can and do develop strong proprietary brands capable of commanding ...

Customer engagement and share-of-wallet (SOW) are relatively new in the marketing literature, and academic research has only limitedly examined these concepts. This study presents five motivational drivers of customer brand engagement in social media and examines the nature of the relationship between these drivers and engagement. The moderation effect of consumer innovativeness on the relation...

Applying uses and gratifications theory (UGT), this study examined consumers’ use of one of four social networking sites (SNSs): Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat, for following brands, and their influence on brand community-related outcomes. Results (N = 297) indicated Snapchat users scored highest for passing time, sharing problems, and improving social knowledge, while Instagram user...