Purpose - The paper aims to outline the managerial challenges faced by the organizations interested in leveraging knowledge and creative talent embedded in online customers' communities to sustain ...innovation in b-2-c industries.Design methodology approach - Through a detailed case study analysis of a leading food producer who launched an online open collaborative platform to gather users' idea for new products the paper aims to highlight the transformational effort that firms have to make in order to leverage knowledge absorption from customers in the context of innovation.Findings - The paper suggests potential strategies for conventional companies to engage consumers in knowledge (co-creation) and collaborative innovation processes, formulating some hypothesis that could support an interpretative model of the capabilities needed to develop, maintain and increase customers' engagement in the exchange.Research limitations implications - The paper presents the first results of an ongoing research that needs to be deepened and widened to cover other kinds of business sectors.Practical implications - On the basis of the case analyzed, the paper suggests some managerial actions that could be adopted to facilitate customers' engagement in processes of collaborative learning and innovation, outlining the potential barriers (in primis managerial reluctance) that could prevent a successful result.Originality value - The case contributes to the literature on co-creation, demonstrating how it can be progressively achieved and improved, through a combination of management and marketing strategies, addressed at accruing not only users' motivation but also managerial commitment.
Building and leveraging the brand community on a social network website (SN) such as Facebook is one of the popular social media strategies that companies employ to build a consumer–brand ...relationship. This research empirically tests a theoretical argument that the perceived benefits of a brand׳s social network website (BSN) influence the consumer׳s relationship with the brand׳s SN, which in turn leads to loyalty behavior. After qualitative exploration of the community to understand the practice of BSN, a quantitative method was utilized to test the hypothesized relationships. The results provide general support for the positive effect of BSN benefits on outcome variables. Specifically, experiential and functional benefits of a brand׳s SN positively influence the consumer׳s perception of relationship investment made by the brand, resulting in both brand relationship quality and the willingness to spread good words about the brand׳s SN. In addition, experiential benefits of BSN positively influence BSN relationship quality, which in turn leads to brand relationship quality, while the effect of functional benefits on BSN relationship quality is not found. The findings provide practical managerial suggestions to marketers and theoretical implications for future studies.
•Experiential and functional benefits have positive effects on perceived relationship quality.•Functional benefits do not have positive effects on BSN relationship quality.•BSN relationship quality has a positive effect on brand relationship quality.•BSN relationship quality has a positive effect on BSN WOM.•BSN WOM does not have a positive effect on the willingness to pay price premium.
Among online communities of customers there are a number of different types of group that need to be distinguished. One interesting type are virtual product user communities, i.e. company sponsored ...online forums where product users share usage experience and collaboratively construct new knowledge to solve technical problems. The purpose of this paper is to show that these “virtual product user communities” are a distinct type of customer group with knowledge innovation capability. The research adopts a method combining observation and content analysis of discussion threads where technical problems are solved, complemented by thematic analysis of interviews with forum members to explore its character, especially its knowledge related attributes. The paper confirms empirically that the virtual product user community is a distinct type of virtual community and can be differentiated from other virtual communities of consumers. In addition, an enhanced classification framework, extending
classic 5Ps model, is proposed to highlight knowledge-related activities in virtual communities. Of particular interest is that the findings suggest that knowledge-related activities should be considered as an important attribute in defining and classifying virtual communities. In terms of practical implications, it is recommended that the virtual product user community should be given appropriate support from top management in order to fully exploit its knowledge innovation value. Moreover, tailored facilitation strategies to promote knowledge construction activities and community development can be developed in accordance with its unique attributes. The paper precisely distinguishes one specific type of innovative virtual community consisting of product users from other online customer communities. Moreover, it outlines a revised virtual community classification framework, which can be widely applied in analysing features of online groups. Its key attribute of knowledge-related activity redirects attention to virtual communities’ knowledge innovation capabilities.
