Developing an improvised brand community model for e-commerce

Abstract

Brand communities are the new way of engaging with customers and improving their loyalty. Compared to the traditional methods, they are more effective and efficient. There have been several successful brand communities like Harley Davidson, P&G, etc. However, the e-commerce industry has not been much successful in its brand community ventures and there a diverse reason for it. Though the industry poses a challenge to develop a successful brand community, there has been a deviation in the efforts taken by the e[1]commerce players in building their communities. A brand community is generally the bonding factor for like-minded people through the brand and everyone in the community would share a common feeling. But it has been found through our research that most of the e-commerce players operate their communities to communicate their promotions and product offerings. As a result, consumers also utilize these communities to seek information and not as a place for engaging. This has led to the low effectiveness of these communities, and they don’t promote brand loyalty. Hence, to promote loyalty these communities should focus on the common feeling that could be shared across everyone in the community and build relationships both between members and with members. To develop a strategy for the same, we have benchmarked on the successful brand communities. By taking lessons from the successful communities while accounting for the constraints in the e-commerce industry, a conceptual model for an e[1]commerce brand community has been suggest.