Customer Brand Engagement (CBE) in social media

“I believe that 99 percent of the Internet’s applications have yet to be invented.”

Vinton Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist, Google (2006)

"CBE is defined as ‘the level of a customer's cognitive, emotional and behavioral investment in specific brand interactions’. Further, three key CBE themes are identified, including: ‘immersion’, ‘passion’ and ‘activation’".

Social media has established a new dynamic in marketing, enabling customers to engage with brands in a variety of ways. Comprehensive model of drivers, outcomes, and moderators of customer brand engagement (CBE) on virtual brand communities in social media are working to fully pioneer the virtual platform. Based on a survey of 799 customers, findings identify involvement, interactivity, and flow experience as key drivers of CBE, and satisfaction, trust, word-of-mouth referrals, and commitment as associated outcomes, with identification and trust in the brand community acting as moderators. This study provides new insights about the CBE process, offering valuable suggestions to brand managers.

Organizations are increasingly seeking customer participation and engagement with their brands. Despite significant practitioner interest, scholarly inquiry into the ‘customer brand engagement’ (CBE) concept has transpired in the literature only relatively recently, resulting in a limited understanding of the concept to-date. developing a CBE conceptualization based on an integrative deductive approach.

CBE is viewed from relationship marketing (RM) and service-dominant (S-D) logic perspectives, whilst an integrative linkage to social exchange theory (SET) is also drawn. Based on the analysis,

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A brand can be viewed as the sum total of all the experiences an audience has with it. Brands are powerful because they can demonstrate personal qualities such as voice, attitude and identity, which give them the ability to form relationships. Participatory media can be used to create and maintain relationships, and are becoming increasingly important in an organisation’s suite of brand engagement strategies. The examples discussed in different stuides show that leverage can be gained through using blogs, online social networks and virtual worlds in branding activities.

A business blog can offer ongoing and regular conversation in a specialist area over periods of time, providing the opportunity for a feedback channel between the organisations, customers and potential customers that contribute to the discussion. A social network can spread brand engagement through the viral effect, creating and sharing content as a result of the relationships within the online community. Through experimenting with virtual worlds and providing an experience for participants, brands are proving that much media attention can be generated and recognition gained among the general public, even if many do not directly participate in virtual worlds.

The converging social, environmental and technical factors underpinning the shift to the participatory culture point to the influence of these forms of media. Complacency or ignorance is not an option for

“99 % of the Internet’s applications are yet not available and 1% of the remaining have yet to be appreciated” Doc Searls, weblog (2006)

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Organisations if they wish their brands to remain relevant to their audiences, who are increasingly choosing to spend their time in the online communities enabled through participatory media.

Participatory media can affect a brand even if the engagement is not instigated by the organisation, because the audience are also producers, consumers and distributors of content. Along with the benefits of using participatory media are downsides, largely due to the lack of control that a brand has over its communication. An organisation should monitor and respond to conversations that occur in the blogosphere and in online social networks to counter any risk to brand reputation. When using participatory media, an awareness of the social and behavioural principles that underpin them will assist brand engagement and mitigation of any risks.

When people genuinely engage in a brand and its narrative, they join in communicating the story. At the heart of a good participatory media activity is a story that the audience finds compelling enough to share with their online community. The starting points identified to assist the development of participatory media strategies for brand engagement are:

Capture the audience’s imagination with a good story. The story should resonate with the audience and encourage them to participate. Choose a story that the audience will engage with in a positive way, congruent with what the brand is and what it does.

Keeptheaudienceatthecentreofthestrategy.Knowthegoalsinengagingwithyour audience. Understand how they feel about the brand and design and assess the risk that the story may create. Create the pathways and tools for them to participate, and listen and promptly respond to the conversation.

Understand how to behave when involved in the conversation. Once the conversation has started, participate in it by being authentic, personable and responsive. Be a good conversationalist by being real – this is no place for ‘corporate speak’ or ‘key messages’.

Opportunities for future research includes how to evaluate the success of participatory media in extending a brand’s reach. While there is exploration of the criteria to evaluate brand engagement through participatory media, there are few well-known measures to benchmark and quantify their success. Evaluation of engagement for websites presently includes quantitative measures such as website hits, click-throughs and conversion rates. These may prove inadequate in the social environment created by participatory media, where intangible concepts such as conversation, participation, ideas and the goodwill created speak more of relationship on a personal level and engagement with the brand.

The investigation into participatory media for Customer Brand Engagement (CBE) has shown that it is a fast-moving and emerging area, as evidenced by the growth of the online communities observed during the research period. Considering the statement that 99 per cent of the internet’s applications are yet to be invented (Cerf 2006), the ideas, concepts and conclusions drawn from this research may well change in a short period of time. The possibilities created for communication and brand engagement through blogs, online social networks and virtual worlds are limited only by the imaginations the individuals and businesses who choose to participate.