With the right strategy, brands can effectively social networking sites to build a brand community, encourage consumer engagement with the community and the brand, and consequently prompt brand value co-creation practices. Research in this area has shown that brands can provide effective value co-creation through social networking sites, but studies are less concerned with understanding the process and methods of value co-creation in social network brand communities and examining consumer responses to value co-creation attempts. With qualitative research, I therefore wanted to find out how brands and consumers co-create value on social networks - more specifically, I was interested in the extent to which brands include consumers in the process of co-creating value and what practices and mechanisms they use; what is the level of consumer involvement and how do they respond to value co-creation attempts; and whether there are differences between individual social networks. The key finding is that while brands involve consumers in value co-creation, they do not use all value co-creation practices equally. Consumers respond most often to product-oriented posts, and their comments are often more positive than negative. Brands, on the other hand, do not regularly respond to consumer comments; analysis showed that in cases where brands respond to consumer comments, these encourage further interaction and dialogue from consumers, while on the other hand, a lower level of dialogue from the brand encourages dialogue between consumers within the community. The analysis showed that compared to other social networks, brands use TikTok to the smallest extent for value co-creation.
|
