ONLINE BRAND FANDOM ON SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES: THE IMPACT OF FAN PAGE USAGE AND ENGAGEMENT ON CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS

摘要

The ways people exchange information and how individuals communicate with each other have changed dramatically over the last years (Hennig-Thurau et al. 2010). Social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube are becoming more and more important in business communication. Traditionally, companies have tried to reach and build up relationships with customers through marketing activities like reward programs and direct marketing. In this world, customers were passive "receivers" of relationship activities as well as brand messages and the company had control over the brand development process (Hennig-Thurau et al. 2010). Today, customers can increasingly integrate and act as co-creators and multipliers of brand messages, which enables enormous viral effects and creates opportunities for word- of-mouth marketing (Kozinets et al. 2010). Social media and especially social networking sites like Facebook of fer companies several options to contact and communicate with their customers. They can be used by companies to integrate and interact with their customer base (Dholakia, Bagozzi and Pearo 2004) as well as deliver a variety of interesting content (Borle, Dholakia and Singh 2010). However, empirical research on fan pages and its role for the customer-brand relationship is in its infancy. Making use of the opportunities provided by fan pages on social networking sites requires a thorough understanding of why consumers are attracted to them and how customer integration and engagement on these platforms influence their relationships to the brands and their of fline behaviors. Therefore, our study investigates how brand fan pages affect the brand relationship of customers.