Brands as relationship builders in the virtual world: A bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Given the growing role of brands as relationship partners and relationship facilitators and the preeminence of the online environment for consumers, this article contributes to the understanding of virtual brand-centric relationships by presenting the first bibliometric mapping analysis of the academic research into the topic from its conception until 2018. Using keyword co-occurrence, it examines 585 records and identifies the most productive countries, journals, influential authors and papers, and research clusters. With 96% of the published records appearing between 2010-2018, this analysis revealed that the field is emergent. The research primarily originates from authors based in the USA, China and the UK. It also is highly fragmented, with papers being published in information management and marketing/branding journals, with cross-citations lacking. In addition, its foundations rest on a small number of works published in a handful of journals by just a few academics. The analysis also identified three main clusters of keywords: (a) identity, feelings and relationship outcomes; (b) relational elements; and (c) relationship facilitation. This bibliometric analysis brings insights together from different research streams, adds to the categorization of the literature on the topic, and provides promising future research directions in terms of research areas and strategies.

Digital ecosystem and consumer engagement: A socio-technical perspective

“…Given the complexity of the phenomenon, the use of multiple methods is not uncommon, especially when the behavior of people in consumption-related groups is investigated (i.e., Schau et al, 2009;Cova and White, 2010;Goulding et al, 2013). The empirical data concern consumer engagement in a digital ecosystem as captured by activities directed at brands, other consumers, and brand communities, a context that has increasingly attracted academic research interest over the last ten years (Veloutsou and Ruiz-Mafé, 2020).…”

“…Reflecting current realities, recent academic scholarship has emphasized the ambient, continuous, and persistent qualities of consumer engagement (Wirtz et al, 2013) and the evolving mesh of digital technologies, which brings about seemingly endless possibilities for engagement (Akaka and Vargo, 2015;Breidbach and Brodie, 2017;Hollebeek et al, 2019;Veloutsou and Ruiz-Mafé, 2020;Venkatesan, 2017).…”

Models for brand relationships

“…As in all evolving fields, the original conceptual work led first to an exploratory investigation of the phenomenon (Fournier, 1998;Ji, 2002), then its measurement (Aaker et al, 2004;Veloutsou, 2007), to a very rapid and sharp growth of the papers and the scope of the academic engagement. To date, thousands of academic articles have been published in the area (Fetscherin and Heinrich, 2015;Albert and Thomson, 2018;Fetscherin et al, 2019;Veloutsou and Ruiz-Mafé, 2020), and many concepts have been identified as, and associated to, descriptors of various forms of brand relationships (Albert and Thomson, 2018). In recent years, the concept also spanned to practitioners who developed and published measurement instruments related to brand relationships such as the Edelman's Trust Barometer [1], the Brand Index by YouGov [2], the Experience Brand Index [3] by Jack Morton, the Brand Affinity Report by Rakuten, the Brand Intimacy Study [4] by MBLM, the Loyalty Report [5] by Bond Brand Loyalty, Prophet's Brand Relevance Index [6], or the Brand Passion Report [7] by NetBase, just to mention a few.…”

Status of the research in fitness apps: A bibliometric analysis

“…To our knowledge, there is no bibliometric study in the field of fitness app research, even though this type of literature has been used widely in other fields in recent years ( Zanjirchi et al, 2019 ). Bibliometrics can supplement existing experiments and review studies, help researchers identify hidden research lines, hot issues, and research methods in the field, and reduce the problems of neglecting certain excellent articles due to the deviation of researchers' subjective judgments ( Zanjirchi et al, 2019 , Veloutsou and Mafe, 2020 ).…”