دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی مصرف کنندگان متعهد: هدایت بین کار و بازی در انجمن های برند آنلاین - الزویر 2018

Abstract

Seriously engaged consumers create and manage online communities dedicated to brands or consumption activities, but this type of engagement remains under-examined. This study explores the contextual triggers and individual drivers of serious engagement in online communities and explains how seriously engaged consumers navigate the intersection between work and play that characterizes serious engagement. We draw from qualitative data spanning over a decade on the trajectory of four seriously engaged consumers who created and/or managed an online brand community for players of Microsoft's Xbox. Three contextual triggers (market-specific practices, marketplace shifts, sociotechnical advancements), when aligned with individual drivers (relevant skills and expertise, entrepreneurial vision, personal commitment), motivate consumers who have been engaged with a brand or consumption activity to deepen their engagement, becoming managers of or launching an online brand community. Consumers can navigate the in-between space of serious leisure through knowledge development or searching for personal fulfillment and/or external recognition. These findings support several contributions to the literature on consumer engagement: demonstrating the vital role seriously engaged consumers play in online community development; drawing attention to contextual triggers and individual drivers of consumer engagement that have not been addressed in prior research; and exploring how consumers navigate the in-between space arising from serious engagement in online communities, finding routes that can lead to deeper engagement in the community itself or redirect it to alternative targets.

Discussion

Our contribution to marketing research on online brand communities resides in introducing the concept of the seriously engaged consumer. Although consumer engagement typologies have been developed for online brand communities (Brodie et al. 2011; Martineau and Arsel 2017), little attention has been given to consumers who create and manage these communities. Serious engagement characterizes the highest level of engagement assumed by consumers in online brand communities. We purposefully employ the adjective “serious” to emphasize that, in this state of engagement, consumers employ and develop skills, knowledge, and responsibilities consonant with complex external conjectures to create and manage online brand communities. The characterization of serious leisure as a state of engagement in online brand communities opens avenues for further research on the practices of seriously engaged consumers, and on how these practices yield value for other consumers (members of the community or not) and for the brand in distinct domains to which engagement is key, such as service relationships or brand co-creation. Moreover, extending prior research that has noted how consumer membership in online communities is dynamic (Brodie et al. 2013) and explored the challenges for consumers who want to become deeply engaged in consumption activities (Boulaire and Cova 2008; Seregina and Weijo 2017), we draw attention to the intersection of contextual triggers and individual drivers that prompts consumers to become seriously engaged in online brand communities.