Customer participation in creating site brand loyalty

Abstract

This article explores the development of an e-business marketing model that capitalizes on customer participation and the likely consequences of such efforts, principally site brand loyalty. A conceptual model illustrates how consumers’ goals in visiting a website (task or experiential) affect their propensity to be site brand loyal and how characteristics of the site, including personalization and community, are related to brand loyalty. The model also shows that creating site brand loyalty leads to predictable affective, cognitive, and behavioral outcomes from customers, such as repeat visits to and patronage of the site, fewer intentions to defect to competitors, and more favorable attitudes toward the site. Case studies of corporate websites provide empirical evidence to support the model. The paper concludes by suggesting that customer participation in the e-business model fundamentally changes the way brands are developed. That is, producers no longer create an image for a brand and pass it on to the consumer; instead, the producer and consumer are interactively creating the e-business brand.

Creating emotions via B2C websites

“…Most online social groups take the form of message boards or typed chat rooms. Online communities show "we intention", which is a sense of group involvement (Bagozzi & Dholakia, 2002) and virtual social interactions give rise to a sense of 'us' versus 'others' (Holland & Menzel Baker, 2001). Popular online communities such as Bayer's support groups for users of their pharmaceutical products testify to the value of connecting people.…”

Building brand relationships online: A comparison of two interactive applications

“…Personalized web sites and customer communities (such as bulletin boards) are among the most common application on brand web-sites today and are both hypothesized to be promising tools for building brand loyalty and strong consumer-brand relationships (Holland and Baker, 2001;Armstrong and Hagel, 1996;Pepper and Rogers, 1997).…”

“…Thus, our study builds on the conceptual model of Holland and Baker (2001), in which personal factors (such as experience, etc.) influence the relative effect of web-personalization and customer communities in developing brand loyalty.…”

User Satisfaction Determinants for Digital Culture Heritage Online Collections

“…Websites "stickiness and the sum of all the website qualities that induce visitors to remain at the website rather than move to another site" [16].…”