3.3 ESTUDIOS EMPÍRICOS

Brand hegemony refers to “both the domination of one brand over others (e.g., Microsoft) and the domination of this brand over its consumers” (Cova and White, 2010). For productive consumers, they are frustrated because the brand owners take advantage of their contribution in the co-creation process. The companies just keep the value and benefits but seldom return to the consumers (Zwick et al., 2008). This matches with Cova et al.’s (2007) forecast:

Where once tribes were seen as transformative to their members, we are beginning to see how they are transformative to business and communicative practices and through them to society itself (p.71).

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On one hand, customers are not paid for their social cooperation, knowledge or passion to the brand. On the other hand, companies even charge a price premium as a result of their fruits of labour from the co-creation of products, services and brand success. As such, consumers gather together to rebel against the double exploitation from the brands and companies. Some frustrated customers create competitor brands in their own counter- brand communities to compete with the brands they used to support (e.g. counter-brand community against Game Workshop) (Cova and White, 2010).

This is in line with Kozinets et al.’s (2008) idea of consumer tribes and their anti-brand action to corporations on the Internet, “in particular, when those corporations are seen as to be acting abusively, unethically, or irresponsibly” (p.353).

3.6 Summary

The concept of online brand community has grown over the past decade, aided by the launch of Web 2.0 technology to enable interaction and co-creation of content by the Internet users.

Online brand communities in form of Facebook, Twitter, blog and forum have been widely adopted by the Fortune 500 corporations to build up brand recognition, loyalty and sales promotion (Boyd and Ellison 2007). However, communities fail to build the sense of community among the members to engage them to make use of the contagious power of social media to achieve the sustainability of business (Culnan et al., 2010). Practitioners are still adopting viral marketing to drive turnover by posting standardized message to the media without understanding how to convey the message to trigger their motive, attitude and behavior from the individual and collective level (Hanna et al., 2011).

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Communities can exploit the identity, emotion and motivation of the brand community members to help them achieve a successful marketing strategy. Nevertheless, thus far, most theories and knowledge have been developed based on offline activities. There has been no comprehensive understanding of the brand community members’ participation behavior in the online mode.

Online brand community is believed to promote consumer interaction, participation and brand loyalty. Previous research has sought to explore different factors relating to participation; however it has overlooked how those factors might bring forth some important consequences, which are important to the success of the online brand community (Hanna and Knight, 2011). It is fair to say that unless practitioners have a clearer overview of factors contributing to the members’ participation, they will not be able to plan and execute the strategy effectively to encourage participation.

Due to the increasing amount of time that consumers have spent in online media, online brand communities have become an indispensable marketing tool for better customer relationship management (Weinberg and Pehlivan, 2011). This view is based on a presumption that the brand successfully implements their strategy. Previous studies have yet to define or identify the factors that increase people’s voluntary participation in online brand communities and its impact on the success of the communities. Although some studies have found out that regular participation has led to the success of an online community, the sustaining and fundamental drives and factors motivating regular participation are yet to be identified (Ardichvili et al., 2003, Woisetschläger et al., 2008).

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Furthermore, even though some studies have examined the factors motivating people’s participation in communities, they are more concerned with overall participation in online community (Dholakia and Bagozzi, 2004, Dholakia et al., 2004, O'Murchu et al., 2004, Wasko and Faraj, 2005) or offline brand communities (McAlexander et al., 2002, Muniz and O’Guinn, 2001, Schouten et al., 2007). Very little research has studied the antecedents and consequences of online brand community participation concurrently (Madupu and Cooley, 2010, Woisetschläger et al., 2008), let alone the study of online anti-brand community.

The evolution of online anti-brand is almost an ignored and unexplored frontier. Thus far, there have been studies of online anti-brand communities in a gradual manner as an alternative study (Hollenbeck and Zinkhan, 2006, Hollenbeck and Zinkhan, 2010, Krishnamurthy and Kucuk, 2009, Kucuk, 2008b, Kucuk, 2008a, Kucuk, 2010).

In the setup of online brand and anti-brand community, the participation and contribution of members are voluntary and are represented as an in-group. This basically matches with the concept of the well-established management called organizational citizenship behavior in an offline mode (Groth, 2005, Organ, 1988, Organ and Konovsky, 1989, Organ et al., 2006). To this point, it would appear that this is a shortage of studies investigating the unpaid members’ voluntary in-group behavior in online brand and anti-brand communities. Apart from the adaptability of existing established concepts of organizational citizenship behavior, it is interesting to understand how common online participation and reciprocal behavior such as being willing to moderate and share knowledge would fit to the concept of citizenship behavior from the online community perspective.

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