Purpose
The purpose of this study is to investigate members’ reactions to the forced closure of a narrative video game brand community and its participatory culture.
Design/methodology/approach
The ...BioWare Social Network forums closure was announced in a thread, which attracted 8,891 posts. These were analysed using thematic analysis, facilitated by the software program Leximancer and non-participatory netnography.
Findings
The brand community and participatory culture members were predominantly distressed because they would lose their relationships with each other and access to the participatory culture’s creative output.
Research limitations/implications
Previous research suggested that video game players cannot be fans and that player-generated content is exploitative. However, members, self-identified as fans, encouraged BioWare’s use of their player-created content for financial gain and articulated the community’s marketing benefits, all of which have implications for Fan and Game Studies’ researchers. Research using primary data could identify brand communities and participatory cultures’ specific benefits and their members’ attitudes about brands’ commercial use of their outputs. Further research is required to identify other products and brands not suitable for establishing brand communities on social media to determine the best ways to manage them.
Practical implications
Addressing narrative brand communities’ complaints quickly can prevent negative financial outcomes and using social media sites for brand communities may not be suitable structurally or because of members’ privacy concerns. Furthermore, consumers often have intense emotional bonds with narrative brands, their communities and participatory cultures, which marketers may underestimate or misunderstand.
Originality/value
This study of the unique phenomenon of the forced closure of a narrative brand community and its participatory culture increased understandings about them.
Purpose
This study aims to investigate consumer perceptions of inauthenticity due to adulteration of a narrative brand ending by using the research context of the final season and ending of the ...television series, Game of Thrones.
Design/methodology/approach
Two data sets totalling 2,032 online comments detailing consumer reactions to the final season of Game of Thrones were analysed using thematic analysis and human interpretive analysis. The coding was an iterative and continuous process, and posts were returned to and re-examined to refine codes and groupings as the analysis progressed.
Findings
The results indicate consumers perceived the ending of the eighth and final season of the television series, Game of Thrones, did not meet their expectations and was not authentic due to rushed writing and illogical character and plot developments. Consumers judged this adulteration was so great that it was a moral violation and transgression. Consumers also sought to assign blame for the inauthenticity, which they attributed to the writers and showrunners, who became the subject of revenge behaviours.
Originality/value
This study indicates consumers of narrative brands, due to their strong emotional attachments to their characters and storyworlds, may perceive unexpected and extensive changes to them as moral violations and transgressions and thus inauthentic. Consumers establish the authenticity of a narrative brand by regularly scrutinising narrative and character development against their expectations as shaped by prior narrative content. Due to their emotional attachment, consumers may attempt to attribute blame for the inauthenticity. The findings have not been established in prior research, and inauthenticity in a narrative brand context is also explored for the first time.
Despite the call in literature, the masstige brands in the service industry remain unexplored exposing an important literature gap. This study employed the masstige theory to explore and ...conceptualize luxury service brands. An initial pre‐test study was used to identify the masstige brands in the service category. Study 2 comprised a quantitative survey on 358 identified masstige brand users for two purposes: (i) To determine the masstige mean scores of the specified brands. (ii) To examine the association between masstige consumption, brand happiness, and brand advocacy for masstige brands in the tourism and airline category. It was found that service masstige brand consumption does influence brand happiness, which further affects consumers' brand advocacy. Further, the masstige consumption and brand happiness relation was moderated by internal motivations but not external motivations. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
Sustainability marketing has emerged as an important trend both in practice and academic literature. The relevant literature has heavily focused on determinations of sustainable consumer behavior, ...and practitioners have used these results to derive short-term marketing decisions, e.g., adequate pricing of sustainable products. However, no study has scrutinized derivations of sustainable brand personalities or provided important long-term, strategic, managerial implications for marketing managers of sustainable brands. This study aims to contribute to this underrepresented research field and makes recommendations for preferred brand personality dimensions for sustainable brands. First, the personality structure of sustainable consumers by using a preference-based two-step segmentation approach is investigated, and subsequent profiling of the sustainable consumer segment is conducted. The research relies on the results of an empirical discrete choice experiment and a personality test, including the data of a representative German consumer sample. Sustainable consumers were found to be highly agreeable and open. Second, the personality results of sustainable consumers are linked to consumers’ personality-specific preferred brand personalities. Third, recommendations for harmonic brand personality dimensions for sustainable brands, e.g., competence, excitement, and sincerity, are derived, and therefore, long-term, strategic, managerial implications are provided.
German and South Korean cultural groups are examined in two studies to demonstrate the link between media communication about sustainability and its impact on eWOM and purchase intentions in luxury ...and non-luxury contexts. A mediation brand attitude model is used to compare groups across cultural, economic, environmental, and social sustainability dimensions, with trust as a moderator. Results indicate that sustainable communication is more effective for non-luxury brands in a cultural setting that features high awareness of needs for sustainability. The study indicates that luxury and non-luxury fashion brand advertisers should carefully consider cultural settings when providing sustainability information. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.
Online brand communities can be valuable to firms, but how do firms cultivate such communities? We find that engagement, that is, "likes" in response to firm posts, in the online brand community is ...associated with subsequent growth in the community. We theorize that when individuals engage with firms' posts, the social media platform broadcasts such interactions to others, who are not necessarily part of the firm's online brand community. Such social diffusion of information about the interaction and the related firm content provides individuals with new information about the firm, based on which they may decide to join the brand community of the firm. We find that firm posts that convey firm credibility through product and industry knowledge, convey organizational achievements through information about firm milestones, partnerships, or awards, seek opinions, and convey promotions or offers, are associated with engagement. Such posts have a significantly greater effect on engagement for early stage brand communities, that is, for those in their first year and a half, than for later stage brand communities.
Product-harm crises are omnipresent in today's marketplace. Such crises can cause major revenue and market-share losses, lead to costly product recalls, and destroy carefully nurtured brand equity. ...Moreover, some of these effects may spill over to nonaffected competitors in the category when they are perceived to be guilty by association. The extant literature lacks generalizable knowledge on the effectiveness of different marketing adjustments that managers often consider to mitigate the consequences of such events. To fill this gap, the authors use large household-scanner panels to analyze 60 fast-moving consumer good product crises that occurred in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands and resulted in the full recall of an entire variety. The authors assess the effects of postcrisis advertising and price adjustments on the change in consumers' brand share and category purchases. In addition, they consider the extent to which the effects are moderated by two key crisis characteristics: the extent of negative publicity surrounding the event and whether the affected brand had to publicly acknowledge blame. Using the empirical findings, the authors provide context-specific managerial recommendations on how to overcome a product-harm crisis.
The existing body of research knowledge on brand management has been predominantly derived from business-to-consumer markets, particularly fast moving consumer goods and has only recently started to ...expand in other contexts. Branding in business-to-business markets has received comparatively little attention in the academic literature due to a belief that industrial buyers are unaffected by the emotional values corresponding to brands. This paper provides a critical discussion of the fragmented literature on business-to-business branding which is organized in five themes: B2B branding benefits; the role of B2B brands in the decision making process; B2B brand architecture; B2B brands as communication enablers and relationship builders; and industrial brand equity. Drawing on the gaps and contradictions in the literature the paper concludes by proposing an agenda for future research.
► Academic inquiry on the subject of B2B branding is limited, fragmented and inconclusive. ► Five broad areas have been highlighted as requiring further systematic and rigorous research. ► Benefits and role of B2B brands; brand architecture; B2B brands as relationship builders; and industrial brand equity. ► Future research directions are identified to further our understanding of how branding can be applied in a B2B context.
Perceptions of private label brands (PLBs) reside in consumer memory along with national brands (NBs). When a consumer engages in a choice situation, both PLBs and NBs rely on links to retrieval cues ...in consumer memory to give them a chance of purchase. This study examines the underlying competition between NBs and PLBs across different retrieval cues. The findings show that PLBs link to the same attributes as NBs and so compete with NBs for retrieval. However, while any brand typically competes most with the brands more commonly associated with any specific cue, the study finds evidence of PLB sub-categorization. That is, if a consumer elicits one PLB for a certain cue, he/she has four times the propensity to elicit other PLBs than elicit a NB for that same cue. This heightened propensity suggests that when a consumer learns that one PLB has a particular quality, the consumer generalizes that quality to other PLBs. Therefore, retailers should realize that the image of competitor retailers' PLBs affects the image of their own PLBs.
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