Digital Families: Building Brand Communities in Online Communication

Absztrakt (kivonat)

An increasing number of online communities motivated scholars to study the notion from various angles, revealing how such communities affect brands to reach their objectives. The purpose of the present thesis aims to get an understanding of the opposite perspective, in which marketers explain how they cooperate with digital communities to support a brand’s growth. The analysis was applied to a theoretical framework that was designed to reveal the results of the research. By examining the most fundamental notions about community, its formation and development, exploring concepts such as a ‘sense of community’, WoM, different types of marketing, branding, and its techniques, as well as prior limitations on the subject, the examination was conducted via qualitative interviews with experts from various functional areas and regions. After conducting interviews based on the literature and methodology, it was concluded that brand growth and success are heavily reliant on its community, the importance of which will continue to be relevant for digital communication and brand market positioning in the future. Particularly, when addressing the research question and testing the hypotheses, the findings indicated that developing communities on social media increases brand loyalty and positive perception, improving brand promotion and engagement via consumer marketing practices. In addition, brand communication through social media communities is a powerful tool to get marketers closer to their consumers, making their relationship personal and influencing. Lastly, the market increase of community networking systems does not influence businesses to prioritize community management in their strategies - they prefer those platforms where their target audience is highly engaged and active. In practice, the present paper can be used as a roadmap for SMEs interested in establishing digital communities for branding objectives. Moreover, it proposes new ideas that can be taken into account in future studies by broadening the number of participants to form focus groups, considering demographic data on SMEs, types of communities addressed by the professionals, as well as refocusing on large corporations and their practices when building brand communities in the digital space.