Since social media has become an essential tool in the contemporary hotel industry, companies are now building social media communities to engage customers online (Leung & Bai, 2013) and to maintain satisfaction, trust, commitment, loyalty, and brand relationship quality (Harrigan, Evers, Miles, & Daly, 2017). Despite global hotel companies’ increasing adoption of social media platforms to promote customer engagement, research in this area is still sparse (Harrigan et al., 2017; So, King, & Sparks, 2014). To fill this gap, the authors developed a theoretical model incorporating two antecedents (hotel brand experience and customer involvement to social media) and a consequence (brand relationship quality) of customer engagement (CE) in the context of hotel brand communities embedded in social media. Additionally, the authors included hotel brand reputation (HBR) in the model as another predictor of brand relationship quality (BRQ). This study obtained data from a panel survey consisting of the responses of hotel customers who had stayed at one of ten famous hotel brands in the U.S. within the past 12 months and were simultaneously followers of the hotel brand’s page on Facebook. The findings reveal that both antecedents (ISM and HBX) positively and significantly influence CE and that hotel brand experience (HBX) has a stronger impact on CE than ISM. The findings also demonstrate that CE has the strongest, positive effect on BRQ, followed by HBX and HBR. Furthermore, the findings indicate that the relationship between HBX and BRQ is partially and significantly mediated by CE. This research provides theoretical and practical contributions to the field. First, unlike previous studies, the current study utilized the concept of CE with hotel brand communities embedded in social media as a mediator between HBX and BRQ and found partial and significant mediation effects. Second, the study identified two new and crucial antecedents of CE with brand communities embedded in social media—customer brand experience and customer social media involvement. Third, this study found brand relationship quality as one of the primary outcomes of customer engagement with hotel brand communities in social media. Lastly, the findings confirm that social media-based brand communities (i.e., Facebook) are one tool companies can use to build long-lasting customer-brand relationships.

The study of online brand communities is inseparable from the concept of customer engagement. The purpose of this study is to conjoin these two emerging research streams in tourism. Past studies relevant to customer engagement in online communities consider it from only brand perspective, whereas this study considers engagement with brand and engagement with community separately. Social identity and user gratification perspective are used to develop framework in building brand relationship quality. The context of the study is to throw light on benefit of China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) on tourism industry in Pakistan. The CPEC is a mega-project between Pakistan and China, worth more than 54 billion US dollars. The Framework was verified using the data collected from several Facebook pages (official and unofficial). This study contributes in understanding the way to enhance brand relationship quality of tourism brand via social media based online communities. This study also validates the customer brand engagement scale consisted of seven dimensions within tourism brand proposed by Dessart, Laurence (2016). The results of this study indicated that community identification has a significant role in engaging customer with community as brand community engagement and with brand as customer brand engagement. Customer brand engagement further enhances brand relationship quality whereas brand community engagement has an insignificant effect on brand relationship quality. This study also provides insight to practical and further research implication.

Festival branding is undergoing a revolution based on the consolidation of new communicative behaviours in virtual brand communities (VBC), above all channelled through social media platforms (Hudson & Hudson, 2013; MacKay, Barbe, Van Winkle, & Halpenny, 2017). Although generic literature (Dessart, Veloutsou, & Morgan-Thomas, 2015) has highlighted the role of user engagement in VBC, there are no in-depth analyses of how users modulate engagement attributes and behaviours and how they are related to festival branding, as well as other possible and sometimes interrelated drivers (social capital creation, place making). Thus, this paper aims to characterise these elements in festivals’ VBC to cover these shortcomings. This proposal performs a multi-platform, multi-period, multi-user and mixed-method analysis of nearly 2,150 references in the Twitter and Facebook VBC of one of the most prominent music festivals in Europe, Sónar (Barcelona). Results show the benefits for organisers (and other relevant users) of jointly understanding these elements (and their mutual relationships) with the aim of retaining various positive economic and social impacts.

The use of brand communities have been hailed as an effective tool for marketers to develop relationships between their brands and consumers, with the ultimate goal to create and sustain brand loyalty. The majority of theoretical assertions regarding brand communities are underpinned by the use of social identity theory (Tajfel, 1982). Social identity theory posits that individuals have a need to construct and display a ‘self-concept’ and a strategy to communicate this is the process of identification with groups. As the focus of a brand community is the brand itself it is clear that brand community identification and brand identification must be correlated, but little research has explored this relationship or its effects. This study aimed to fill a gap within the knowledge by further exploring the relationship between brand identification and brand community identification by providing more insight into the role which an individuals’ identification with a brand community (Muniz and O’Guinn, 2001) has within their relationship with the focal brand and their loyalty to that brand. Specifically, this research aimed to gain a greater understanding of the different effect brand community identification had upon the relationship between brand identification and both public and private brand loyalty. This was explored through the utilisation of a survey of fans of a professional basketball team within the UK (n=298). The data and subsequent analysis supported the hypotheses that individuals’ brand community identification has a positive relationship with both public and private forms of brand loyalty. More importantly it also presented brand community identification as a mediator in the relationship between brand identification and public brand loyalty. Therefore, this study is the first to present brand community identification as critical within consumers’ development of publicly displayed brand loyalty. Managerially this understanding provides support for the proactive utilisation of brand communities by marketers. It also provides guidance for the context in which brand communities are critical for the success of the brand. This research delivers support for marketers, to utilise brand communities proactively when trying to motivate consumers to participate in publicly displayed pro-brand behaviour. This guides the re-allocation of budget away from pure brand identification activities to brand community engagement strategies.

Recently, marketing researchers have started to explore the impact of Social Media Brand Communities in digital marketing strategies. However, in spite of this interest, scant attention has been paid to the micro-mechanisms stimulating electronic word of mouth (E-WOM) within social media brand community. In this sense, this exploratory research aims to explore how consumers‟ engagement is related with positive E-WOM.

Social media are increasingly becoming a strategic vehicle of modern companies’ way of communicating and interacting with consumers. Actually, social media marketing (SMM) has recently emerged as an effective two-way communication channel able to provide the sharing and exchange of information, ideas, and user-generated content in virtual environments. This is especially true for fashion brands, which are progressively creating interactive platforms such as online brand communities in order to enhance their consumer-based brand equity (CBE), interpreted as the consumers’ assessment of a company brand image, identity, and value. Scholars have widely analyzed the relationship between a company’s SMM and brand equity, thus finding a direct positive impact of the five main constructs depicting perceived SMM activities, namely entertainment, interaction, trendiness, customization, and word of mouth, on CBE. Despite this relevant scholarly interest, the consumer behavioral responses linking a company perceived SMM activities and CBE have been largely neglected. Actually, consumers’ benefits from virtual environments and online brand experience may represent significant elements marketing strategists should focus on in order to enhance a company’s brand equity. Building on the uses and gratifications theory and experiential marketing, we develop a conceptual model that unpacks such linkages, by relating SMM activities, perceived benefits of using social media, online brand experience, and CBE. Specifically, we interpret SMM activities as significant brand-related stimuli able to influence consumers’ cognitive, social interactive, personal interactive, and hedonic benefits, which in turn influence consumers’ sensory, affective, behavioral, and intellectual online experience. Moreover, we investigate the experiential responses of consumers that mostly affect a company’s brand equity, which finally impacts on consumers’ purchase intention of the fashion brand. The model is validated using structural equation modeling (SEM) on a sample of real users of online brand communities operating in the fashion industry. Our sample is composed of Millennials, which currently represent the most influential grown-digital generation of consumers. Overall, our findings shed light on consumers’ online behavioral and experiential responses to a company’s perceived SMM activities, thus proposing strategic implications for the management of brand online communities and suggesting interesting possibilities of future research on social media and fashion consumers.

Brand communities have been increasingly used by marketers to build brands. A brand community can be defined as a “…group of consumers with a shared enthusiasm for the brand and a well-developed social identity, whose members engage jointly in group actions to accomplish collective goals and/or express mutual sentiments and commitments” (Bagozzi and Dholakia, 2006, p. 45). Recent research on brand communities has begun to identify the importance of consumers’ psychological processes in regard to developing successful brand communities. Based on the flow theory from positive psychology, we propose that flow could be generated by brand community characteristics and plays an important role in influencing brand community members’ attitudes toward the brand. Specifically, we propose a model that identifies brand community characteristics (i.e., community cohesiveness and information quality) that produce flow experience and how the flow experience impacts brand identification and brand loyalty. Members from 31 automobile brand communities participated in this survey study, and 580 validated questionnaires were returned. Structural Equation Model was used to test the research hypotheses. The results show that community cohesiveness and information quality positively directly influence brand identification and also indirectly influence brand identification via flow. Flow also positively influences members’ brand identification and, subsequently, impacts brand loyalty. The results from our research contribute to the branding, brand community, and flow theory literature.

Luxury brand marketers have recently turned their attention to luxury brand consumers and their social brand communities devoted to the brands. Luxury brands appeal to customers by enhancing their images regarding heritage, quality, and artistic value. Luxury fashion brands also establish social media communities to communicate their images more effectively. This study uses the key concepts of integration and interactivity to provide theoretical foundations to investigate luxury brand communities (LBCs) in the social media context. A survey was given to 252 members of Facebook fan pages for luxury brands from South Korea. This study examines effects of interaction as a process on perceived interactivity of LBCs in social media, and consequences, attitude, purchase intentions, and brand loyalties, hence offering implications for luxury brand management academics and practitioners

This study uses ingratiation theory (Jones, 1964) to investigate the specificity of online luxury brand communities, using an observational netnography. We analyse and discuss the diverging strategies held by low and high power community members, and the role played by flattery in maintaining and gaining status in the community.

New communication challenges for companies that use social media are: 1) the knowledge and control of the degree of alignment between communicated and perceived brand personality in order to measure the effectiveness of competitive positioning, and 2) the measurement of engagement among consumers who share comments about brands in online communities. Our research proposes research tools that can help fashion companies meet these challenges. In particular, we present an innovative methodological approach that combines netnography and text-mining to extract and analyze data from online communities of fashion brands.

The purpose of this study is to offer conceptual foundations of social brand community by developing an integrated overview of the current research. Concepts from the Structuration theory are used for synthesizing the consumer behavior literature. This study attempts to find and fill the gaps between brand community and social brand community. To fill the gaps in the literature, potential research questions and future research directions are suggested. This study offers foundations to develop a conceptual model of social brand community by considering the basic concepts in the Structuration theory and critical characteristics of the social media environment.