Customer participation in brand communities on social media: A systematic literature review

Abstract

Social media has emerged as an area of prominent importance for both industry and academia. Recently, a number of brand communities have come up on various social media platforms and members of these communities are increasingly using social networking sites to contact fellow members in order to get required information about the brand(s). The purpose of this paper is to review the existing literature of customer participation in online brand communities and to present the various constructs that appeared because of discussion in the literature. This paper explores, analyses and presents a literature review by closely examining 100 articles published during 2001 to 2016, primarily from the leading marketing and management journals. The findings of this review show that regardless of the plenty of studies take place in this area; a conceptual framework for member participation is undetermined. This review presents a framework depicting various antecedents, mediators, moderators and consequences of customer participation in the online brand communities on social media. Apart from this, various theories and models used in the reviewed articles were also described. This review also addresses research gaps in this area and presents them in the form of future research directions.