¬the Relationship Between Activity in an Online Brand Community and Brand Loyalty

595 Words3 Pages
¬The relationship between activity in an online brand community and brand loyalty Over the past decades, the internet has become an important part of our everyday lives. But how does activity in an online brand community affect the actual level of brand loyalty? Morgan (2000) distinguishes two main ways of interpreting brand loyalty. Loyalty can be about what one feels - a reflection of the emotional attachment that consumers feel for brands – or what one does – repeated behavior (i.e. purchasing) over time. Kabiraj and Shanmugan (2011) give a single definition, combining both interpretations. They state that brand loyalty is the consumer’s conscious or unconscious decision, expressed through intention or behavior, to repurchase a brand continually. In this paper, we consider brand loyalty to be the emotional attachment that consumers feel for brands. A brand community has been defined as a specialized, non-geographically bound community, based on a structured set of social relations among admirers of a brand (Muniz & O’Guinn, 2001). An addition to this definition is that brand community is customer-centric, for the meaningfulness of a community customer experience is more important than the brand around which that experience revolves (McAlexander & Schouten, 2002). According to Williams and Cothrel (2000), Online communities can be defined as groups of people who engage in many-to-many interactions online. For this paper, we chose to define an online brand community as an online community, based on a structured set of social relations among admirers of a brand. Quantitative research by Algesheimer, Dholakia and Herrmann (2005) indicates that continued membership of a brand community leads to stronger loyalty intentions by customers. They link the influence of a brand community to behavioral intentions including recommendation and loyalty to the brand.

More about ¬the Relationship Between Activity in an Online Brand Community and Brand Loyalty

Open Document