Member-initiated online communities (MIOCs) serve as digital spaces where members meet, exchange ideas, and form relationships around a topic of common interest. With the rise of digital communication channels, MIOCs have grown and constitute potential market segments for companies to seize. Prior research has investigated information exchange and value generation in MIOCs for members, but third-party leverage of MIOCs from a marketing perspective is an unexplored research field. The current research investigates brand-generated posts in MIOCs from a persuasion knowledge and social capital theory perspective. Adopting varying levels of brand prominence, our findings from an exploratory survey study and four experiments show that lower brand prominence of a brand-generated post induces higher WOM and purchase intention, mediated by the mechanism of perceived post authenticity. Further, we find that the persuasion knowledge and authenticity mechanism are weakened for members with high social capital. This finding contributes to a better understanding of the role of social capital in situations where brands attempt entry into MIOCs. Our study is the first to generate insights into how brands can best enter MIOCs, contributing to the literature on brand prominence in online communities and monetization of social capital.
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Abstract auf Seite 10
Dieser Eintrag ist Teil der Universitätsbibliographie.
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