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ABSTRACT
Consumers making product & brand choices are increasingly turning to computer-mediated communication for information on which to base their decisions. Besides perusing advertising & corporate websites, consumers are using newsgroup, chat rooms, email & other online formats to share ideas, build communities & contact fellow consumers who are seen as more objective information source.
Marketing researchers use a variety of methods to study consumers. NETNOGRAPHY is one such qualitative & explorative research approach to analyse the consumer dialogue in online communities in order to gain unbiased consumer insights. These consumer insights in turn are converted into solutions. If these solutions are implemented in the product or service, it can capture lot of market.
This review focuses on virtual/digital communities, research methodology tool, the procedure to conduct Netnograhy, result dimensions of Netnograhy, its scope and limitations and managerial implications along with an example of netnographic product produced by Campbell.
Keywords: Netnograhy, virtual ethnography, digital ethnography.
INTRODUCTION
The internet has become one of the most important communication channels in the world in recent years due to the vast increase of people with ready access to it. In addition, this growing internet usage is creating wide changes in the consumer purchasing process. Indeed, consumers are increasingly turning to computer-mediated communication in order to get information on which to base their decisions (Kozinets, 2002).
The researchers and practitioners in marketing are focusing their attention towards social networks. Small low-level events, such as interactions among a few customers, could result in higher-level intensity such as development of brand communities and therefore, emergent behaviors can affect the ability to position a product. Today, analyzing the social networks has become very important tool to understand the complexity and exchange patterns of markets. The advent of the Internet has revolutionized word-of-mouth communication, creating strong online communities allowing businesses to build customer loyalty to a degree that is difficult to obtain in today's business environment and to generate strong economic returns.
VIRTUAL/DIGITAL COMMUNITIES
A virtual community is a social network of individual served to build and develop virtual brand communities (Andersen, 2005), which are consumers aggregations that occurred in the internet because of their interest in some brand or product (Muniz and O'Guinn, 2001).
People use the community for various purposes such...