The brand personalities of brand communities: an analysis of online communicationShow others and affiliations
2017 (English)In: Online information review (Print), ISSN 1468-4527, E-ISSN 1468-4535, Vol. 41, no 7, p. 1064-1075Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
Purpose
Online brand communities provide a wealth of insights about how consumers perceive and talk about a brand, rather than what the firm communicates about the brand. The purpose of this paper is to understand whether the brand personality of an online brand community, rather than of the brand itself, can be deduced from the online communication within that brand community.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper is empirical in nature. The authors use community-generated content from eight online brand communities and perform content analysis using the text analysis software Diction. The authors employ the five brand personality dictionaries (competence, excitement, ruggedness, sincerity and sophistication) from the Pitt et al. (2007) dictionary source as the basis for the authors’ analysis.
Findings
The paper offers two main contributions. First, it identifies two types of communities: those focusing on solving functional problems that consumers might encounter with a firm’s offering and those focusing on broader engagement with the brand. Second, the study serves as a blueprint that marketers can adopt to analyze online brand communities using a computerized approach. Such a blueprint is beneficial not only to analyze a firm’s own online brand community but also that of competitors, thus providing insights into how their brand stacks up against competitor brands.
Originality/value
This is the first paper examining the nature of online brand communities by means of computerized content analysis. The authors outline a number of areas that marketing scholars could explore further based on the authors analysis. The paper also highlights implications for marketers when establishing, managing, monitoring and analyzing online brand communities
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2017. Vol. 41, no 7, p. 1064-1075
National Category
Business Administration
Research subject
Industrial Marketing
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:ltu:diva-66420DOI: 10.1108/OIR-08-2016-0235ISI: 000414581000011Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85032914563OAI: oai:DiVA.org:ltu-66420DiVA, id: diva2:1155191
Note
Validerad;2017;Nivå 2;2017-11-07 (andbra)
2017-11-072017-11-072017-11-24Bibliographically approved