Brand Community : A Community Of Brand Followers And Customers

The brand image is the brand's total personality impression in the consumer’s mind (real and imaginary qualities and shortcomings). It is developed through advertising campaigns over time with a consistent theme. Talbot and his team conducted social media research and there objective was to: -

A brand is a portfolio of qualities associated with a name, which in turn invokes certain images to individuals and hold values beyond the benefits of a product (Iacobucci, 2018). Brand association occurs when customers make a cognitive or emotional association with a particular brand. For instance, when a customer sees a certain color, symbol, logo, or name they automatically can make a connection to a particular brand. Brands start with a name that conveys information, suggest their benefits, or can even be named after their founders (Iacobucci, 2018). In the marketing perspective marketers can control the brand which they are marketing by using catching logos, colors, slogans, or even the products shape and appearance. In marketing a marketer can control the message they are trying to convey but cannot really have control over an individual’s association with that particular brand. Once a customer has an association with a particular brand they may favor the brand based on a past experience or even that individual’s sense of style or they may dislike a brand because of an association they

Social Media has changed the communication setting for all marketers. “Perhaps the greatest value of social media marketing is your ability to foster and engage with a community of people” (moz.com). An involved audience is one of the greatest resources a brand can have. There

Social media has become a central theme on building and maintaining brand loyalty. At Sweet Sheenanigans, brand loyalty of the customers is positively affected when the brand (1) offers advantageous campaigns, (2) offers relevant content, (3) appears on various platforms and offers applications on social media Erdoğmuş, İ. E., & Cicek, M. (2012).

Since an increasing number of people focus on brand names instead of product, brands become important elements for customers to choose products (Carroll, 2008). When customers trust the brand, the benefits for the manufactures are generated. In the first place, brands can be used by products as the tool to identify and differentiate themselves from various products. Secondly, brands are helpful for companies to build a competitive advantage (Bick, 2009). Therefore, organisations take more attention to branding.

"Brand engagement is the next step and the long journey, the finally magical result of millions of powerful touchpoints your people create with their customers. From marketing to sales to service to culture, we sculpt messages and moments that move

In today’s business world, social media is being discussed on a daily basis. This phenomenon has taken over the marketing and advertising industries and has changed the way they handle their efforts to attract customers. There is a big misunderstanding that social media are only popular networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, but as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, social media are “forms of electronic communication (as Web sites for social networking and micro blogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (as videos).” The rise of these online communities has given companies an opportunity to engage in conversations with their customers. This in

The relation brand-consumer changed aspect. The brands have to watch henceforth what people say of them on these social media and to begin the dialogue with their consumers to make sure to keep a good "e-reputation" and to enter a relational optics with their customers. But they can also benefit from these digital social networks to try to create consumers' community on-line "ambassadors" around them, to federate them and to develop loyalty of them thanks to a communication and specific tools.

According to Sashi (2012) customer engagement is a topic that has had an emerging interest during the last years, based on the development of Internet and the new tools that have emerged with it – Web 2.0 (Sashi, 2012). Due to the increasingly networking society customers can easily interact with other customers and this non-transactional customer behavior has become more important for companies when developing their strategies (Verhoef et al., 2010). Hollebeek et al. (2014) and van Doorn et al. (2010) mention how important the understanding of online brand engagement is in the social media platforms as well as recognizing the opportunities for brand to extract value from their followers. Van Doorn (2010) supports also, that it is important for companies to fully understand the impact of customer brand engagement since the digital world involves a broad audience with immediacy breadth.

There are a number of ways to market your products, serve your customers and improve your products or services. But rarely do all of these functions fall under a single platform – until you consider setting up a customer community.

There is no doubt that the customer is king because without customer, there is no business. Today, brand can easily attract or lose customers. With the increasing number of social platform and numbers of creating account, customers’ voices are raised among social media, web sites or forum. In fact, we can observe that, nowadays, customers don’t hesitate to question brands, to congratulate, to criticize and even to require that brand deliver them messages adapted to their profile and their interest. Particularly with

The "groundswell", which is the term now being used for online social technologies, such as blogs, social networking sites like MySpace, and user-generated sites like YouTube and numerous other online communities now common on the Web, is making a dramatic impact on the way many organizations are conducting their marketing strategies. These online social networking sites have enabled the power to shift from the companies to the customer, this shift in power is being termed "customercentric". Companies can no longer rely on their perceptions of what customers want or the way they want the customer to perceive their organization, or products and services. The customers are now banning with one another through the many

In recent times, branding has played a pivotal role in some brands’ success. This has been made possible through the ability of some marketers to capture the essence and minds of people (consumers), and put the trends and characteristics into the personality of a brand. Customers have always found ways to identify themselves with certain products, and on several occasions, branding campaigns

As the development of communication technology and global market, the concept of Brand Community was fist defined as ‘a specialized, non-geographically bound community, based on a structured set of social relationships among admirers of a brand’ by two social scientists, Albert M. Muniz, JR and Thomas C. O’Guinn (2001). This essay will firstly give a brief overview of brand community, and then point out three main characteristics and further discuss these features of brand community based on the article by Muniz and O’Guinn (2001) using the supporters of Manchester United Football Club as an example.

The concept of Brand loyalty is defined in terms of 6 necessary and sufficient conditions. These conditions are as follows: -