Brand Community: Expertise heterogeneity and behavioural intentions

Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation is to demonstrate how individual consumers are able to interact among themselves inside the collective virtual community of consumption in order to co-create value. By using the concepts of resources from the Service Dominant Logic of Marketing, heterogeneity from Organizational Behavior literature, and cultural lens from Consumer Culture Theory, this dissertation considers both individual and collective interaction in order to demonstrate the relation between community of consumption and behavioral intentions generated within these specific brand names. We consider an online community of consumption as a virtual working environment where consumers are free to collaborate and, therefore, generate value. In detail, when drawing upon consumer behavior and organizational theory literatures, we identify a model able to explain how these individual and social characteristics of a community of consumption influence the consumers participation and their continuing intentions to remain members of the community. In addition we show how this model works differently through two kinds of brand community: firm-driver and consumers-driver. An up to date review of literature provides a guide to theory and a path for research. This dissertation employed surveys, interview in-depth and linear regression model to understand social and cultural aspects of consumption from four different online communities of consumption. The findings show that consumers can contribute to co-create value among themselves through the role of heterogeneity expertise and how the value of co-creation process could be more efficient inside the community consumers-driver. This dissertation demonstrates that this last kind of brand community plays a role as a platform of value creation. This dissertation extends the previous researches in value creation within brand community by demonstrating how different kind of consumer expertise can affect their capacity to interact and can harm their ability to collaborate and co-create value.