Netnographic Research Research Articles

Society Concern on Fire on Forests and Land Checked on Ciberspace

Wildfires on land and forests that occur mainly in regions of the interior of Brazil. These destroy the surroundings and can affect the lives of people in the vicinity. The amount of these offenses has increased annually. It is interesting to see the interest of society in relation to the issue. The purpose of this paper is to describe the perception of Brazilians in cyberspace in relation to burning. A netnographic research of quantitative nature and qualitative bias is carried out in which the number of websites approaching the theme for several periods is observed. It seems that there is an increase in the amount of information and therefore interest in the subject.

Creating convivial affordances: A study of virtual world social movements

AbstractThe study of technology and societal challenges is a growing area in information systems research. This paper explores how social movements can use virtual worlds to raise awareness or create safe spaces for their members. As social movements move into virtual worlds, the technical environment becomes more important. This paper presents an interpretive field study using netnographic research and empirical data from a study of a lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender social movement in World of Warcraft. This paper takes the position that an understanding of affordances is required for users to be able to create convivial outcomes to shape the use of virtual worlds for their own goals and intentions. The paper presents the concept of convivial affordances, which brings together the theories of affordances and conviviality, and suggests that social users can shape IT artefacts through a creative combination of affordances for their specific goals, and with community involvement.

Preferência de consumo no uso do sistema Ford SYNC: um estudo netnográfico

The decision to purchase a car is strongly symbolic and related to unique marketing approaches. Therefore, it is important to understand this phenomenon, particularly from the perspective of technological innovation. This article presents an analysis of the consumer’s preference in the segment of automobiles, emphasizing the preferences regarding the technological convergence with new multimedia systems, such as Ford SYNC. The study is based on a netnographic research that aims to understand how the variables hedonism, utilitarianism, social value, and self-extension influence the intention of buying a car, emphasizing the offer of embedded new multimedia systems, using the case of the Ford Motor Company’s SYNC system. The analysis revealed three categories, with implicit subcategories. The results demonstrate that the values discussed in theory directly influence the context and are preponderant in the consumers’ decision-making. This article contributes to the automobile industry by offering essential inputs regarding consumer preference, leading to reflections in the area of marketing to better understand future consumers’ demands.

Netnography as a marketing research tool in the fashion industry in Southeast Europe

In the past decades, marketing has been revolutionized by digital sources, which provide marketers with rich information on potential consumers. Consequently, this article explores the evolving opportunities that online communities present to marketers in collecting consumer insights. It advances Southeast Europe’s marketing researchers’ understanding of netnography by introducing them to its concept, procedures, and implications. This study triangulates the data through utilizing seven one-to-one in-depth interviews with fashion designers, employing two focus groups with fashion consumers who actively congregate in online communities, and through conducting netnography on a fashion-related online community. This article demonstrates netnography practices, and experiences with the goal of having fashion designers and marketers understand its potential as an efficient method for providing effective qualitative market intelligence. It shows that netnography is a relatively easy, cost-effective and time-efficient approach, and it supports brand development through achieving a better understanding of consumer perceptions. Overall, netnography has great potential as a marketing research tool. Online fashion community members’ views support it as most of them prefer to participate in netnographic research. Nevertheless, the majority of fashion designers in Southeast Europe are not fully aware of the method and its exact procedures and, hence, avoid using it.

Capitalismo consciente: uma análise netnográfica em grupos da rede social LinkedIn

Resumo O capitalismo consciente (CC), estruturado por John Mackey e Raj Sisodia Sisodia, tem base nos princípios do propósito maior, da integração dos stakeholders, da liderança consciente e da cultura e gestão consciente, entendendo que o capitalismo pode ser uma força tanto para a economia e para o bem-estar social quanto para o meio ambiente. Nesse contexto, o objetivo do estudo foi identificar e analisar o conteúdo postado e as interações acerca do tema CC nos grupos da rede social LinkedIn. A pesquisa se caracteriza como qualitativa quanto à abordagem, exploratória e descritiva quanto aos objetivos e netnográfica quanto aos procedimentos, com observação em grupos do LinkedIn. Para realizá-la foi utilizado o modelo de fluxo simplificado de um projeto de investigação netnográfica de Kozinets (2010). Os principais resultados apontam que: a maioria dos idealizadores dos grupos se encontra nos Estados Unidos da América (EUA), país onde o CC nasceu; os grupos foram criados com a finalidade de interagir com temas ligados ao CC; as interações nos grupos ocorrem principalmente por meio de postagens e comentários com assuntos referentes ao CC, no entanto, o número de membros de um grupo não reflete maior quantidade de interações. Por fim, a maior parte dos grupos entende o CC de acordo com a definição estabelecida por seus idealizadores, John Mackey e Raj Sisodia, porém, colocá-lo em prática nas organizações tem sido um desafio.

Reviewing the Role of Netnographic Research in Bridging the Gap between Youngsters and Adults

Reviewing the Role of Netnographic Research in Bridging the Gap between Youngsters and Adults

Triggers of Collaborative Innovation in Online User Communities

This study contributes to the understanding of collaborative innovation in online user communities. Aside from providing evidence for the existence of these communities, prior research focused on users’ motivations, backgrounds, and roles at the micro level but largely neglected to examine the effects of individual user activities on joint activities at the community level. By applying a netnographic research design, which is followed by a content analysis step and logistic regression analysis, we explore to what degree different user activities trigger collaborative innovation inside a community. We find two factors inherent to the initial post of a thread, problem complexity and collaboration intention, which explain the probability of collaborative innovation. The likelihood of joint activities is raised significantly if the contribution of a user ranks high on both dimensions. By quantifying collaborative user innovation, we hope to encourage the inclusion of user activities in future policy considerations. Moreover, understanding the effects of individual user activities at the community level may help companies to understand users of technologies better and to identify opportunities for collaboration.

Customer Attitude towards Online Ads of Smartphone Brands: A Netnographic Analysis of User Generated Comments on YouTube

Today ads are no more one-sided communication but a mixture of online and offline channels developed for the sake of direct interaction with the communities. YouTube in specific and other online video platforms in general have shifted paradigm of TV commercials altogether for many brands.Just like other product brands, smartphone brands have also their presence on social media including YouTube and have their channels at it. The smartphone online ads on YouTube gain millions of views, thousands of likes, and dislikes, comments and replies to these comments.However, these quantitative metrics cannot necessarily be seen as an indicator of effectiveness of online video ads. There is a need to have some qualitative and exploratory evaluations to know about viewer's attitude toward the online brands of smartphones. This netnographic (ethnographic) research study is examining viewers' attitude toward smartphone brands ads. 13 video ads of 4 popular smartphone brands(Samsung, Huawei, Oppo, and Q Mobile) in Pakistan have been taken with 2926 viewer's comments and their replies. The findings are helping in the assessment of viewers (consumers) comments on the basis of cognitive and emotive processing and supportive and antagonistic stance toward online smartphone ads as well as brands. The research outcomes have implications for marketing managers specifically of smartphone brands to use smartphone video ads as a part of their viral marketing campaign. The research paper is also discussing the limitations and future research directions.

Northern Lights Instead of Workers’ Rights: Volunteer Working Tourists in Finnish Lapland

Research on volunteers in the tourism field often deals with the motivations of such persons as well as their effects on host locales, while research on the work conditions of tourism workers often focuses solely on paid employees. However, such research has not focused on the workplace condi- tions for volunteer working tourists in the tourism arena whose motivation, among other reasons, for seeking unpaid work opportunities is a dual role of tourism consumer.As volunteers are not for- mally employed, they are not entitled to legal workplace standards.This article examines, through netnographic research methods and thematic analysis, the workplace experiences of several vol- unteer working tourists in Finnish Lapland, considering how similar to precarious employment their situation is, to some extent enabled by their tourism mindset. This raises curious questions about the use of such labor, suggesting their future inclusion within discussions of precarious work

Online shopping experience in an emerging e‐retailing market: Towards a conceptual model

AbstractWe develop a comprehensive and integrated framework of online shopping experience (hereafter OSE) from an emerging market perspective. Using a netnographic research method, we content analysed 284 experiential reviews of 2 leading Nigerian e‐retailers. Augmented by the theory of customer engagement, we identify 8 dimensions of OSE that activate shoppers' affective and cognitive states, which consequently lead to 4 behavioural outcomes, namely, internal responses to service experience, external responses to service experience, repurchase intentions, and word of mouth intentions. The proposed dynamic and comprehensive framework reflects all phases of the consumer decision‐making process and demonstrates that OSE has both perceptual and behavioural components. We make 3 important contributions. First, the paper provides a comprehensive and dynamic model of customer experience that encompasses all the stages in the customer decision‐making process by drawing on a new theoretical perspective to demonstrate how the unique attributes of OSE contribute to extant customer experience research. Second, we advance experiential consumption theory by incorporating attributes of OSE evolved through a unique qualitative research method into existing frameworks of customer experience. Third, we compare and contrast findings from an emerging market with research from more mature markets, when they were undergoing similar development patterns. From a managerial perspective, we illustrate how online retailers operating in emerging markets can draw from the experiences of mature markets and understand the key differences between markets so that they can develop customer experience management strategies by concentrating on the most important components of customer experience.

More-than-human netnography

ABSTRACTDrawing on actor-network theory (ANT), this paper develops a ‘more-than-human’ conception of netnography to extend current thinking on the scope, focus and methods of netnographic research. The proposed approach seeks to account more clearly for the role of human and non-human actors in networked sociality and sets out to examine the interactions of people, technology and socio-material practices. The paper critiques reductive applications of netnography, bound by proceduralism, and advocates research that embraces the complex, multi-temporal, multi-spatial nature of internet and technology-mediated sociality. It challenges researchers to examine and account for the performative capacities of actors and their practices of enactment. By synthesising insights from ANT and emerging work in marketing and consumer research that adopts relational approaches, this paper outlines the challenges and opportunities in developing more-than-human netnographies as an approach to extend current netnography.

Sharing food photographs on social media: performative Xiaozi lifestyle in Young, middle-class Chinese urbanites’ WeChat ‘Moments’

ABSTRACTSharing food photographs on social media is on the rise. This act has become increasingly popular in younger generation urban Chinese users’ everyday use of WeChat, the popular social media application. In this article, I argue that self-presentation provides an angle to understand aspects of young, middle-class urbanites’ food-photograph sharing. This article comprises an eight-month project, conducting netnographic research of 16 young, middle-class Chinese urbanites’ WeChat usage. Through the netnographic research, I discovered that, by displaying geotagged snapshots of food, these young urbanites disclose their everyday consumer experience in particular urban spaces. Aspects of this practice feed into these urbanites’ performance of Xiaozi tastes, facilitating the self-presentation of their class distinction. The outcomes of the research provide a glimpse into the interplay between post-reform consumerism, Xiaozi lifestyle, and social media usage in the urban, middle-class Chinese younger generation’s everyday lives.

Facebook “verde amarelo” e preferência de uso da rede para os brasileiros

The social network Facebook comprises a large web users worldwide, corresponding to approximately 1,4 billions of users. The Brazil is the second most visited site by Internet users and the preferred network among those who seek interaction, sociability and entertainment. In this context, the object of the study was to analyse the usability of Facebook among brazilians users in online environments, given that intense connection share content and range of information available on the organizations website. Two complementary qualitative methods were developed, with the first based on netnographic research and the second applying questionnaires via Facebook and email. Results show seven (7) categories of users that emphasize the different behaviors of use and treat the values that stimulate or repress the usability. In this context, these groups of users open approaches to the various possibilities of organizations to reach consumers generating insights for marketing.

Digital consumers as cultural curators: the irony of Vaporwave

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to address the question of cultural production, consumption and intermediation in the context of digital music.Design/methodology/approachThis research adopts an interpretivist, ethnoconsumerist epistemology along with a netnographic research design combined with hermeneutic analysis. Interpreting both the text view and field view of an ethnoconsumerist approach, the netnographic research design includes participant observation across multiple social media platforms as well as virtual interviews and analysis of media material. The context of application is a digital music subculture known as Vaporwave. Vaporwave participants deliberately distort fundamental aspects of modern and postmodern culture in a digital, musical, artistic and storied manner.FindingsHermeneutic analysis has identified a critical and nostalgic narrative of consumerism and hyper-reality, evident as symbolic parallels, intertextual relationships, existential themes and cultural codes. As a techno savvy community embracing lo-fi production, self-releasing promotion and anonymity from within a complexity of aliases and myriad collaborations, the vaporous existentialism of Vaporwave participants skirts copyright liability in the process. Accordingly, Vaporwave is documented as blurring reality and fantasy, material and symbolic, production and consumption. Essentially, Vaporwave participants are shown to be digital natives turned digital rebels and heretical consumers, better described as cultural curators.Research limitations/implicationsThis research demonstrates a more complex notion of cultural production, consumption and intermediation, argued to be more accurately described as cultural curation.Practical implicationsAs digital heretics, Vaporwave participants challenge traditional notions of modernity, such as copyright law, and postmodern notions such as working consumers and consuming producers.Social implicationsVaporwave participants present a case of digital natives turned digital rebels and consumer heretics, who are actively curating culture.Originality/valueThis interpretive ethnoconusmerist study combining netnography and hermeneutic analysis of an online underground music subculture known as Vaporwave shows digital music artists as cultural curators.

Google Me This: What Can Project Management Be for Libraries in the Age of Google et al.?

Given the challenges the libraries are facing in pursuit of adapting to the changes of the new century’s information and communication revolution, using project management as proficiency instrument for taming these challenges can be beneficial for libraries. This article abridgedly presents the key theoretical aspects of project management, the state of affair of foreign libraries using project management as seen in the specialized scientific literature from the last few years, and, last, but not least, an attempt to establish the degree of use of project management in Romanian libraries at the moment of 2015 by the means of an interview guide and a netnographical research of one of the Romanian professional online platforms, Biblos [1]. Even though the results of the interview and the netnographic research have not met the expected results, the data revealed a certain status quo of the relationship the Romanian professional community has with project management culture.

Teachers’ Professional Development: The Case of WhatsApp

In this study, the kinds of shares made by science teachers in a WhatsApp group as an online community of practice to support professional development were examined. The netnographic research method, one of the qualitative research methods, was used in the study. The messages shared by 12 science teachers, who worked at a private school between the years 2015-2016, in the WhatsApp group were examined in the study. Content analysis was applied to the data, and the themes were created. In the study, it was observed that teachers made shares in four different themes that support professional development. These were found to be shares for field knowledge, shares for pedagogical content knowledge, shares for in-school teaching practices and shares for emotional support among teachers. In this context, it was revealed that programs providing online chatting opportunities could be an important tool in ensuring the professional development of teachers.

The work of mapping and the mapping of work: prosumer roles in crowdsourced maps

ABSTRACTThis paper presents an analysis of crowdsourcing work with a particular focus on exploring what forces and characteristics of the collaboration practices and technologies encourage and discourage prosumer work behaviours. Data were gathered through depth interviews with prosumers of a crowdsourced digital nautical map, observational netnographic research of prosumers on angling forums, and interviews and meetings with the map providers. Incorporating research on consumer work and prosumption, three distinct prosumer roles are identified based on how angling prosumers differentially produce and consume the crowdsourced maps. These roles show multiple behaviours along the prosumption continuum, and in so doing extend the continuum by introducing a second dimension – work as private versus public prosumer activity. It concludes by offering suggestions for marketers to engage with prosumers in crowdsourcing contexts.

Radicalising the marketing of higher education: learning from student-generated social media data

ABSTRACTThe social media landscape creates opportunities for higher education institutions (HEIs) to amplify psychological engagement with students and to increase influence impressions by following student(s)-to-student(s) conversations and stories. Evidence of understanding how HEIs can utilise student-generated social media data for higher education marketing and branding purposes is underexplored. This paper adopts a netnographic research method to illustrate how social media artefacts, such as the ‘This Is Where I Study’ (TIWIS) Facebook page, created by students in the form of dialogues and content can be analysed by HEIs to listen, engage further and influence students’ impressions. TIWIS illustrates that students’ engagement with social media platforms such as Facebook is dynamic in nature. It comprises behavioural expressions (manifestations and actions such as likes and shares as well as opinion comments) and individuals’ experiences (subjective in nature stories and comments of personal experiences and views). Hence, netnographic analysis allows capturing actual behaviours via longitudinal ‘big data’ sets and supports HEIs in proactive branding. Analysis of social media data demonstrates the value of encouraging and making accessible authentic conversations in order to create student-centred content.

Conceptualising tourist experiences with new attractions: the case of escape rooms

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to theoretically and empirically explore tourist experiences with the niche-like, yet global phenomenon of escape room attractions.Design/methodology/approachAn exploratory empirical study of visitors’ experiences with selected top-rated escape rooms in the USA and Europe was carried out by means of netnographic research and automated content analysis.FindingsThe results show that this attraction provides new, peak, unique and fun experiences through the challenging activities and social component of the game play. The findings provide an insight into both the authenticity of experiences with novel attractions and the group aspects of fun and flow concepts.Research limitations/implicationsThe findings are restricted to online reviews on the TripAdvisor website and are possibly biased because of the use of a non-random sample.Practical implicationsTheoretical implications are discussed and explicated as future research questions. They are relevant for the conceptual development, research and management of playful experiences within urban and special interest tourism. Societal implications are also addressed.Originality/valueThis paper is a preliminary in-depth examination of the escape room phenomenon from the customer experience standpoint. It is of relevance for the conceptualisation and improvement of tourist experiences with new and fun attractions.

Ethical questions related to using netnography as research method

Netnography is a relatively new research method, which adapts research techniques of ethnography to study cultures and communities through computer-mediated communications. It has become a popular research method in marketing research during the 21st century. However, the use of netnography in the field of information systems (later referred as IS) has not been studied to great extent. Thus, we have conducted a systematic literature review to investigate the ethical practices of netnographic research in the field IS.To analyse the ethical practices of netnographic research and discussion surrounding it, we have collected 52 articles which use netnography either as their sole research method or as their completing research method. These articles were selected from 77 IS journals. Our findings indicate that netnography is an emerging research method which is still moulding its ethical guidelines. Researchers, who use netnography, do not completely agree on the ethically just manner of conducting netnography. However, it is apparent that certain ways of conducting netnography are often considered to be ethically just where as some other ways might be often considered to be ethically unjust.