The evolution of the internet led to a shift in the business operations environment, giving rise to a plethora of challenges and opportunities for companies. Social networks have become attractive to companies due to their interactive nature, not only facilitating conversations with consumers, but also increasing the possibility of enhancing the online consumer brand engagement. Additionally, social networks and online brand communities increased consumers’ possibility of developing an active role in companies’ decision-making process, through the creation of user generated content, together with the opinion sharing and directly information exchange with brands and other internet users. The main objective of this research is to ascertain whether the active listening practice can contribute, in some way, to the improvement of the relationship maintained between consumers and brands. The current study suggests the adaptation of the active listening practice on the online field, as an attempt to enhance the communication strategies held by brands. Hence, this research seeks to demonstrate that this practice can improve the consumer-brand relationship through the development of two qualitative studies, as main approach, where the findings extracted in the first study will be used as inputs to the second one.

This study examined the effect of active and passive listening condition on young children's musical understanding of familiar and unfamiliar melody through researcher-invented notation. All subjects in this study were Korean children from 3 to 5 years of ages in a private prekindergarten in Seoul Korea. A pre-and posttest experimental design guided this study, which was conducted for five consecutive weeks, including three treatment sessions between pre-and posttest sessions in summer of 2009. The following research questions for the study were posed: 1) Is there a significant difference in young children's apparent understanding of tempo when comparing active and passive listening condition? and 2) Is there a significant difference in young children's apparent understanding of tempo according to familiarity of the melody? Listening conditions (independent variable) in this study were the presence or absence of body movement while children listened to short musical examples. The children's apparent musical understanding of tempo (independent variable) was captured through children's guided drawings that indicated where they understood tempo changes to occur in the music. The drawings were evaluated by three independent judges who scored four drawings for each child: for familiar and unfamiliar melodies in both the pre-and posttest. A two-way ANOVA was used to analyze the scores. The results revealed that there is no statistically significant difference between treatment and control groups, between familiar and unfamiliar melody, and no difference with the interaction of group and melody familiarity. Therefore, the null hypotheses for this study were accepted.