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Marketing and social media
Edited by Keith S. Coulter
Introduction
Brand communities offer both firms and customers new ways to engage with each other. Whilst companies aim at engaging with loyal customers, influencing members' perceptions about the brand, disseminating information, and learning from and about customers ([1] Algesheimer et al. , 2005), customers gain value through the variety of practices that they perform online and offline ([48] Schau et al. , 2009). Although originally, an online brand community referred to a community on the World Wide Web, recently social media has been added to companies' marketing and brand building activities ([29] Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010). Attracted by the large number of users, companies have created brand communities in social media, such as Facebook, which boasts of having more than 500 million active users ([57] www.Facebook.Com, 2011). Past studies on brand communities have not included, to our knowledge, these new communities.
To date, research has investigated to what extent customers identify with and engage motivationally with the brand and the brand community, the factors that explain this engagement, and how they impact customers' intended behaviors ([1] Algesheimer et al. , 2005). However, in this paper, we move beyond feelings of brand community engagement and employ the recently introduced concept of customer engagement as a behavioral manifestation ([9] Bolton, 2011; [53] van Doorn et al. , 2010). This type of customer engagement is directly related to the emergence of new media and all the new ways in which customers can interact with firms, including purchase and non-purchase behavior ([31] Libai, 2011). It is defined as "a behavioral manifestation toward the brand or firm that goes beyond transactions" ([54] Verhoef et al. , 2010, p. 247), and includes all consumer-to-firm interactions and consumer-to-consumer communications about the brand. Customer engagement recognizes that consumers carry out a number of firm-related behaviors of which many did not exist a decade ago and that may have both positive and negative consequences (e.g. positive versus negative reviews) for the firm. Such behaviors include online discussions, commenting, information search and opinion polls. In particular, customer engagement includes all communication through brand communities, blogging and other social media ([53] van Doorn et al. , 2010). The present paper chooses to look at one forum...