The Determinants and Consequences of Brand Community Identification

Relationship marketing stresses attracting, maintaining, and enhancing long-term customer relationships instead of focusing on individual transactions. Such long-term relationships provide a competitive advantage and strategic resource for the firm. A brand community is a specialized, non-geographically bound community, based on a structured set of social relationships among admirers of a brand. Community is arguably the fundamental social relationship, having its roots in the familial relationship often used to define relationship marketing. It provides a good template to overlay the relationship between the company/ brand and those who consume. Recently, the notion of the brand community occupies a particularly important space in marketing research. Many studies underline this interest, including the ability of brand communities to influence members』 perceptions and actions, to rapidly disseminate information, to engage and collaborate with highly loyal customers; and to engage in activities. Despite this body of work, there has been a dearth of research focusing on the value-building process within a community. The conceptual model proposed in this paper is an attempt to close the theoretical gap. This paper has presented a testable model describing the relationship between the determinants and consequences of brand community identification. The author examines three characteristics, including company-related factors, consumer-related factors and network-related factors that marketers can leverage to enhance consumers' identification with a community and, ultimately, increase brand equity and brand extension intention. Overall, we pursue two goals in this paper. First, we identify three characteristics that promote identification. Secondly, this article forwards a framework illustrating the role of community identification in the construction of brand equity and brand extension.

Project ID:PF9611-0082
External Project ID:NSC96-2416-H182-010