Brand Advocates and Crowdsourcing Practices on Social Media: A Conceptual Paper

Abstract

The current demand for maintaining successful relationship marketing has prompted companies to use various tools with diverse techniques to achieve their communication objectives. Crowdsourcing can be considered as a promising concept which has revolutionized the process of obtaining, managing and maintaining consumers via the seamless connectivity of the online environment. Through this concept, companies can incorporate brand advocates into their communication programs as an effort to establish relationship with potential consumers. This seems to be congruent with the act of brand advocates increasingly using social media to share opinions and provide positive mentions about a brand. Their participation and engagement on social media can be examined through their willingness to recommend a brand without any incentives or rewards. In this research, the motivation for volunteering will be assessed along with the evaluation of brand relationship quality to demonstrate the intensity and strength of the relationship between the advocates and a brand. This paper presents a comprehensive framework of crowdsourcing practices on social media that describe the volunteering motives of brand advocates, which in turn leads to satisfactory and powerful relationship building. Data is proposed to be collected through a web-based survey and analyzed using the structural equation modelling technique. This study provides a practical framework to enhance brand relationship using technologically advanced crowdsourcing practices with digital communication as a platform.