Brand Affinity Research Articles

Strategi Sukses K-Pop Memasuki Pasar Musik Mainstream: Bighit Entertainment, BTS, dan ‘Army’

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this study is to identify the differentiation strategy of K-pop agency in the digital economic era, as well as the role of fans in their application. The focus of this research is on BigHit Entertainment the agency that manages the current phenomenal K-pop group, namely BTS; as well as the behavior of their fans. This descriptive qualitative research uses secondary data collected from articles and videos related to the agency, the group, and their fans; as well as observational data from social media, like Twitter. This research use Miles and Huberman model of analisys techniques which include data reduction, data presentation, and conclusion drawing. The results of analysis show that BigHit Entertainment applied the strategies of product differentiation, marketing channel differentiation and image differentiation in order to obtain competitive advantage. Those differentiation strategies is in line with the tactical steps of digital marketing that begin with an understanding of consumer behavior, and then continued with human-oriented marketing for brand attractiveness, content marketing for brand recognition, omnichannel marketing for brand commitment, and engagement marketing for brand affinity. During the process of strategy implementation, fans that mostly consist of young people and women played a major role as a good brand advocate and contents distributors.

Acceptability of SPECTRUM Research Cigarettes among Participants in Trials of Reduced Nicotine Content Cigarettes.

SPECTRUM research cigarettes (SPECTRUMs) are being used in trials evaluating the effects of switching to reduced nicotine content (RNC) cigarettes. Because smokers have a high brand affinity, we evaluated if they were willing to switch and continue smoking normal nicotine content (NNC) SPECTRUMs. We asked smokers (N = 341) to rate their own brand of cigarettes and NNC SPECTRUMs (after 2 weeks of use) using subjective measures including satisfaction, reward, taste, and craving reduction. We measured plasma cotinine, exhaled carbon monoxide (CO), and cigarettes per day (CPD), and recorded reasons for dropping out. After 2 weeks, 95% of participants chose to continue using SPECTRUMs for an additional 18 weeks. Moreover, 67% said SPECTRUMs were as good as or better than their own brand, and 65% said they would consider purchasing them. Ratings of satisfaction, reward, and craving reduction were 10%-15% lower on SPECTRUMs than on their own brand (p < .01). There were no differences in these ratings between menthol and non-menthol smokers. Menthol and non-menthol SPECTRUMs are acceptable to smokers. Lower SPECTRUM ratings were likely due to brand switching and did not hinder study retention.

Triggering and tempering brand advocacy by frontline employees: vendor and customer-related influences

PurposeLawler (2001) posits that social exchanges create a sense of shared responsibility for outcome success. The purpose of this study is to apply this framework to the vendor/frontline employee/customer triad to examine the underlying role of emotions in how frontline employees’ evaluations of vendors and customers trigger and temper brand advocacy efforts, respectively.Design/methodology/approachWith cross-sectional data from 168 frontline employees working at a leading national retailer of electronic goods, path analysis is used to evaluate the hypotheses.FindingsFrontline employees’ relationship quality with the vendor and perceptions of vendors’ product quality positively influence brand advocacy. Also, customers’ brand affinity and recommendation preference both demonstrate a significant, negative curvilinear relationship with brand advocacy.Research limitations/implicationsFrontline employees’ emotion-laden evaluations of vendors and customer influence brand advocacy in different ways. Vendor relationship quality and brand quality perceptions “trigger” brand advocacy. However, customer’s affinity toward a vendor’s brand and willingness to seek recommendations “temper” brand advocacy. Specifically, brand advocacy effort is low when customers possess very low and very high affinity toward a focal brand – moderate affinity spurs high advocacy; likewise, advocacy is low when customers demonstrate very low and very high interest in seeking the frontline employees’ opinion – moderate interest spurs high advocacy. Although ideal to examine vendor and customer emotional exchanges, using only frontline employee data from a technology-selling retailer may constrain generalizability.Practical implicationsFrontline employee training programs should emphasize the customer’s role in the transaction to increase perceptions of shared responsibility, as a means to create a favorable emotional experience, and accentuate timing strategies on when to pursue heightened or diminished emotionally charged brand advocacy efforts.Originality/valueThis study contributes to the frontline employee behavior literature by viewing shared responsibility in transactions as a source of emotional value, explaining variance in frontline employee brand advocacy through relationship and product quality dimensions, and uncovering curvilinear effects for customers’ brand affinity and recommendation preference in elucidating brand advocacy.

The study on negative eWOM and its relationship to consumer’s intention to switch Mobile Service Provider

Recent developments in social media has transformed consumer-brand trust relationship into consumer-consumer trust engagement where consumers make similar brand choices influenced by the opinion of other consumers. Consumers establish online networks and conversations embedded in trust, on similar tastes, viewpoints, preferences and other types of brand affinity behaviours. These online consumer conversations across multiple social media platforms contributes to voluminous electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM). An average of 70% of consumers look out for other consumers’ opinions on a brand to learn more about the products or services of interest and out of this consumer generated contents, a whopping 50% are consumer grouses or complaints. This study identifies emerging key mobile service consumption elements highlighted by consumers in discussion thread revolving a viral, negative eWOM through qualitative method of netnography. The study findings include eWOM contains multiple and relevant consumer behavioural contextual elements that may be leveraged upon to understand how negative eWOM influences mobile consumer switching intentions in Malaysia.

Social business adoption

No longer simply a fad, social media-based technologies are used by organizations to create innovative ideas that can enhance both a firm’s product offerings and the ways in which it conducts its business activities. Despite its many apparent uses and benefits, there are several barriers associated with their use, including legal, security, and privacy risk. Grounded in the technology adoption theory, the purpose of this study is to understand how businesses perceive the benefits of and barriers to social media and its effects on adoption. Employing the partial least squares method, a research model was developed and tested via a survey of 117 senior employees from organizations in South Korea and New Zealand. The results suggest that the benefits due to social media, such as brand affinity, sales opportunities, and customer support, positively affect social business adoption; whereas a lack of social media strategy and security concerns negatively affect social business adoption. The results of the study have important implications for business managers and researchers.

The Role of Social Media in World as a Key Instrument

It’s no secret that “word of mouth” has always been considered one of the most powerful forms of marketing for a business. Social media today is the ultimate word-of-mouth marketing. Getting people to connect with you online in the social space helps spread the word about who your company is and your products and services. Social media has changed the way the world communicates, creating real time interconnectivity between people, businesses, and geographies. As social media continues to grow in popularity, brands are looking for ways to increase their fan base and leverage their social presence to increase sales and brand affinity. Social media is a powerful tool for engaging your customers and fans in a conversation. So there are really two functions of social media for business: 1) Are you participating in the conversation and sharing, and 2) Are you listening and monitoring what is being said about you. Social media takes work, there’s no doubt about it. Any business that has tried running their own Facebook and Twitter profiles knows that gaining new customers is more difficult than it seems. What role should social media play in your marketing? At the end of the day, with right tools and strategy in place, social media marketing can be scary and should/will play a large part in your overall digital strategy. Social media’s role in your overall digital strategy comes down to four main things: 1) Building a fan base 2) Reputation monitoring 3) Conducting customer service 4) Generating leads Social media mining is a process of representing, analyzing, and extracting actionable patterns from social media data. Social media mining introduces basic concepts and principal algorithms suitable for investigating massive social media data; it discusses theories and methodologies from different disciplines such as computer science, data mining, machine learning, social network analysis, network science, sociology, ethnography, statistics, optimization, and mathematics. It encompasses the tools to formally represent, measure, model, and mine meaningful patterns from large-scale social media data. Keywords : Internet, Social networking media, Social media,Communication etc.

‘Kid tested, mother approved’: the relationship between advertising expenditures and ‘most-loved’ brands

In this research, we examine the relationship between advertising expenditures and perceptions regarding popular brands as held by children and mothers in the United States. Our findings show that traditional media advertising expenditures positively relate with brand affinity for children and mothers, while product placement relates positively with children's brand affinity but not with mothers' brand affinity. A closer examination of advertising budgets reveals that marketers for the top children's brands devote most of their advertising to TV and magazine advertisements, indicating that they still believe that traditional media play a key role in reaching the youth market. Additionally, the advertisers spend disproportionately higher amounts to reach Hispanic and African American populations.

The Role of Social Media as Key of Business Development

Social media has changed the way the world communicates, creating real time interconnectivity between people, businesses, and geographies. As social media continues to grow in popularity, brands are looking for ways to increase their fan base and leverage their social presence to increase sales and brand affinity. Social media is a powerful tool for engaging your customers and fans in a conversation. Open up two-way communication between your business and your consumers to provide a way to stay connected with your fans and to introduce your brand to those who are less familiar. Interact with your fans and reply to what they have to say. By engaging in conversation, you’ll gain exposure on social channels and increase credibility by getting your customers to refer your brand or talk about their experience with your company. In dynamic market environment, distribution channels, marketing activities, diversification strategies, and food quality are increasingly important. Innovation in social networking media has revolutionized the world in 21st Century. Social networking media presents potentially opportunities for new forms of communication and commerce between marketers and consumers. As advertisers typically want to find some way to follow their target audiences, many new media opportunities are presented to advertisers. Communication through social networking media is more specified, with effective interactive strategy among its users. In recent days, internet advertising has taken new forms which have more advantages over the traditional mediums like print media, TV and radio. Marketing communication is becoming precise, personal, interesting, interactive and social. Dialogue between consumers and the brand is presented in the paper on the case of a leading brand in the category of fast moving consumer goods on market. The paper presents internet marketing activities that have contributed to building a relationship with the brand. The main thesis of present case was an effectiveness of communication and strategy done through social networking media could increase brand relationship with young people. Keywords: Internet, Social networking media, Fast Moving Consumer Goods.

Building brand equity in retail banks: the case of Trinidad and Tobago

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate an integrated model mapping the influence of brand affinity, customer experience, and customer satisfaction on brand equity in retail banking. Design/methodology/approach – Data were collected from 315 banking customers in Trinidad and Tobago through personally administered structured questionnaires and analyzed with Structural Equation Modelling. Findings – The findings showed the mediating role of customer satisfaction in brand equity relationships. The results also showed the pivotal role of brand affinity, customer satisfaction, and service experience in explaining brand equity. Practical implications – The study provides an integrated approach to brand building. It also offers an objective framework brand owners can use to evaluate marketing investments. It also provides a clear brand differentiation strategy for bank brands. Finally, it introduces cross-cultural research in brand equity which can be a useful competitive tool for indigenous banks and foreign banks seeking market expansion strategies. Originality/value – This research is one of the few studies that analyzed brand equity in retail banking. It advanced a brand equity framework that explores the mediating role of customer satisfaction and provides a guide to uplift perceptions and stimulate customer confidence in the banking sector.

Study of Brand Affinity and Crowd Craze

Study of Brand Affinity and Crowd Craze

The Power of Popularity

This pioneering study explores the convergence of social economic behavior in our new, hyperconnected world. In statistical tests, the correlation of Facebook brand page fan counts of the 30 most popular consumer brands and their respective brand company stock prices were found to be statistically significant, despite the general upward trend for fan counts and radically different stock price performances over a 12-month period. The results suggest that the social media popularity itself, as a construct for consumer following or public interest, may serve as some type of behavioral indicator of brand affinity, customer loyalty, or brand performance.

Audience Selection for On-Line Brand Advertising: Privacy-Friendly Social Network Targeting

This paper describes and evaluates privacy-friendly methods for extracting quasi-social networks from browser behavior on user-generated content sites, for the purpose of finding good audiences for brand advertising (as opposed to click maximizing, for example). Targeting social-network neighbors resonates well with advertisers, and on-line browsing behavior data counterintuitively can allow the identification of good audiences anonymously. Besides being one of the first papers to our knowledge on data mining for on-line brand advertising, this paper makes several important contributions. We introduce a framework for evaluating brand audiences, in analogy to predictive-modeling holdout evaluation. We introduce methods for extracting quasi-social networks from data on visitations to social networking pages, without collecting any information on the identities of the browsers or the content of the social-network pages. We introduce measures of brand proximity in the network, and show that audiences with high brand proximity indeed show substantially higher brand affinity. Finally, we provide evidence that the quasi-social network embeds a true social network, which along with results from social theory offers one explanation for the increases in audience brand affinity.

Sponsorship drives global brand affinity

Sponsorship drives global brand affinity

Building brand community membership within organizations: a viable internal branding alternative?

PurposeThis paper seeks to propose and test the appropriateness of a brand community within an internal branding framework.Design/methodology/approachUsing the multidimensional constructs of brand community and the strengths of internal branding strategies, this study explores the theoretical underpinnings of combining the two constructs.FindingsIntraorganizational brand communities are presented as a viable strategic possibility for targeting internal branding participants. Results lend strong support to the need for and efficacy of internal brand communities, and provide an opportunity to examine the strategic synergies of pursuing such a strategy for internal as well as external audiences.Research limitations/implicationsThe study was delimited to domestic participants. Additional studies are recommended to further test the constructs of brand community membership in an internal brand community.Practical implicationsExternal branding initiatives and communications can be used internally, among employees, to build positive brand associations and brand affinity. Further, implementing an internal brand community can lead to increases in the emotional buy‐in of employees and ultimately could help companies increase the proportion of “champion” employees.Originality/valueThe study integrates the research streams of brand community and internal branding and studies the viability of conducting internal branding within a brand community framework.

The cause manifesto

PurposeThis paper seeks to encourage loyalty marketers to embrace cause‐related marketing.Design/methodology/approachThe paper explores companies which have used or are using cause‐related marketing, from McDonald's 1984‐established Ronald McDonald House to the newer LIVESTRONG campaign, and examines which programs’ successes, failures and consumer reactions.FindingsAccording to the 2008 Edelman goodpurpose study, 63 percent of consumers think companies spend too much on marketing and advertising and should set aside more for a “good cause”. Even during a recession, the study adds, 80 percent of global consumers think it is still important that brands and companies set aside money for a social purpose. A recent survey of 9,000 consumers worldwide by Boston Consulting Group indicates that, despite the economic downturn, buying green products remains a priority – a majority of respondents in all countries expressed a willingness to pay a premium of 5 percent or more for green products, and 73 percent considered it important that companies have good environmental records.Practical implicationsToday, cause marketing is more than just a trend – it is an imperative. What began as a simple way to build brand affinity has become a consumer expectation in an era in which sustainable and ethical consumer choices are more important than ever before. And within that framework, loyalty marketing tactics are at the heart of creative innovation.Originality/valueThe paper presents exclusive interviews with representatives from some of the largest marketing firms in the industry today and offers tangible tips and tools to utilize in the real world marketing plans.

The internationalisation of a sports team brand: the case of European soccer teams

Today, in the sports arena, the status of a sports team brand is vital. The purpose of this paper is to describe and explain how a team can become an international global brand. Following a conceptual approach, it articulates a model for a team's brand internationalisation and proposes four strategies relevant to the sports arena - Brand Reputation; Brand Affinity; Brand Challenger; and Brand Conquistador. It illustrates this internationalisation process via three case studies: Football Club Barcelona, Paris Saint-Germain and Olympique de Marseille.

“The World's Local Bank”: Glocalisation as a Strategy in Corporate Branding Discourse

This paper looks at how HSBC banking group represent themselves in their externally oriented discourse as a brand combining the global and the local. Drawing on a variety of samples such as history brochures, advertisements and websites, the study combines quantitative and qualitative methods in its analysis of how visual and linguistic elements function to construct the HSBC brand. It is argued that branding in this case relies on a stereotyped version of the local that is used to endow the brand with a “human touch” and create brand affinity with a globalised audience. In cognitive terms, the company is seen to blend the two schemas of the global and the local and to metaphorically emulate perceived consumer identities to the same end.

Brand affinity & television programme sponsorship

Sponsorship of TV programmes offers suppliers of goods and services the potential to strengthen brand loyalty and brand positioning among viewers. Care needs to be taken in matching the emotional appeals of the brand and the programme as well as buyer and viewer profiles. At the evaluation stage, superficial measures of recall and awareness can provide an unrealistic evaluation in comparison with measuring viewers' reactions in greater depth.