Efecto de la confianza en la lealtad y el eWOM en las comunidades virtuales de marca.

La confianza en la marca y en la Comunidad Virtual de Marca (CVM) pueden contribuir a la generación de lealtad a la marca y eWOM positivo. Sin embargo, no han sido muchos los estudios empíricos que han incluido ambos tipos de confianza en la evaluación de los resultados de las CVM. Por lo tanto, este trabajo tiene como objetivo explorar cómo la confianza en la marca y la confianza en la comunidad influyen en la lealtad y en el eWOM. Para ello se emplearon datos procedentes de una encuesta realizada a usuarios de CVM que fueron analizados mediante la técnica PLS. Los resultados confirman que la confianza en la marca influye en la lealtad y en el eWOM tanto directamente, como indirectamente a través de la confianza en la CVM. Además, la lealtad favorece la generación de eWOM. Las implicaciones para la práctica de marketing son comentadas.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Brandright

Trademark law is guilty of overprotection. This overprotection pits both a company’s in-house attorneys against its own marketing professionals and the company itself against its most loyal customers. The result appears illogical, at best, to consumers witnessing the effects of this clash between a company’s marketing needs and perceived legal requirements

Fans of Brands - The revival of fan clubs

Our purpose is to display the meaning of fan clubs and further reveal the potential value of fans. This study has an abductive approach with a qualitative data collection, where empirical material has been collected through a micro netnographic study along with qualitative interviews. IKEA and IKEA Family have been applied together with virtual fan clubs to study the fan club phenomenon. The study is based on prior literature concerning loyalty, customer clubs and brand relations. This theoretical framework was chosen to fulfil the purpose of unveiling the meaning of fan clubs and the potential value of fans. The empirical data is based on qualitative expert interviews, observations of online fan clubs and qualitative interviews with IKEA fans from different countries (face-to-face, e-mail, telephone). Fan clubs are highly related to social groupings, which further implicates that they are a key driver of loyalty. Due to this strong resemblance, corporation can utilize this tool to get a stronger brand-consumer relation. Nevertheless, fan clubs is the tool, while it is the fans that are the core value. Wherefore it is crucial for companies to acknowledge their fans by implementing a fan club as a loyalty program, which will create a win-win situation for both parties

A literature review

Despite the continuing interest in consumption-focused communities and the economic incentives of increasing the performance of brands, the two phenomena are seldom observed in conjunction with each other. This literature review draws from past research to examine the increasing of brand performance through brand equity and brand loyalty together with market orientation and innovative culture, and the various forms of online consumption communities, focusing on consumer-driven online brand- and themed communities. The main objective of the literature review is to discover, how consumer-driven online communities affect a brand’s performance. The findings of the study reveal that consumer-driven online communities affect brand performance in various direct and indirect ways, such as word-of-mouth communication and providing valuable information to marketers. The possibility of negative brand performance effects is also discovered and discussed. The findings of the literature review are examined through examples of consumer-driven online communities, which exhibit behaviour similar to the theoretical background. Finally, key implications for academic and managerial purposes are discussed

Generation Z Consumers as a Challenge for a Community Manager

Social media - especially for young generation Z - have become an essential tool for establishing private, professional and consumer relations. People from generation Z constitute an increasingly demanding group of customers. They do not know the era when the Internet or smartphones have not existed. In fact, they have been using these technologies from their earliest years, hence they are often called digital natives. The possibility of using social media commercially for marketing purposes gave rise to a new profession - community manager. It refers to a professional who deals with day-to-day communication with fans and interacts with the recipients of published content. He or she answers questions from fans, responds to emails, and often conducts long discussions to keep fans engaged, strengthen the brand's contact with its potential customers and build a positive image of the company. The aim of this paper is to identify challenges/tasks for community managers resulting from special characteristics of generation Z members and their behaviour on social media. As well as literature review, a survey was conducted among 233 students - representatives of generation Z. Analysis of the gathered empirical data gave basis for verifying the formulated research hypotheses and concluding that people from generation Z are not loyal customers, meaning that they usually do not get attached to the brand/company, product/service, and that generation Z customers are not willing to defend a company's reputation on social media. Additionally, the strength of relationships between the analysed variables and a respondent's sex and place of residence was verified

Digital Food Marketing to Children and Adolescents: Problematic Practices and Policy Interventions

Examines trends in digital marketing to youth that uses "immersive" techniques, social media, behavioral profiling, location targeting and mobile marketing, and neuroscience methods. Recommends principles for regulating inappropriate advertising to youth

Factors Motivating the Customers’ SNS Brand Page Behavior: Comparison between China and Korea

Purpose – The wide spread and usage of SNS brand pages in companies has renovated the brand strategy in the new era. Embedded in an organically grown network of social ties, SNS brand pages show great differences from the ordinary online brand community. Called upon by the new research opportunities, this paper investigates the motivating factors (functional benefits, hedonic benefits, economic benefits and intrinsic benefits) influencing customers’ SNS brand page behavior (participation/commitment) in the cultural context of China and Korea, so as to provide meaningful implications to the companies’ effective use of SNS brand pages, and help global companies in their development of brand strategies for the two countries. Design/methodology/approach – In all, 407 Chinese and 384 Korean SNS brand page users were surveyed to conduct the above research agenda by structural equation modeling. Findings –prior motivating factor constructs are valid in influencing the consumers’ participation in and commitment to SNS brand pages in both countries, yet with dissimilarities in the significance and strength. Information seeking is not significantly correlated with the SNS brand page behavior in China, and convenience is found not correlate in Korea. Brand reputation in China and reward in Korea are the most influential factors of participation behavior. Interaction plays an important role in affecting commitment behavior in both countries. Participation has a positive impact on purchase intention in two countries, but only Chinese samples’ commitment has a positive impact on purchase intention