Virtual communities: A marketing perspective

By Kristine de Valck, Gerrit van Bruggen, Berend Wierenga. Decision Support Systems, 2009

652 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Increasingly, consumers interact through the Internet to share their knowledge, experiences, and opinions. Consequently, 'word-of-mouse' has become a significant market force that influences consumer decision-making. On the basis of extensive quantitative and qualitative research, the authors sketch how consumers make use of virtual communities as social and information networks, and how this affects their decision-making processes. We present three studies that address (i) determinants and effects of virtual community influence on the consumer decision process; (ii) virtual community participation patterns; and (iii) discussion practices of the most active community members. Key implications for managers, marketers, and market researchers are discussed.

Subfields: Communication, Information Systems and Management, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8643bf64920a15d1678fd40832450a131a682c95

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In Communication

In Information Systems and Management

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

The impact of online brand community characteristics on customer engagement: An application of Stimulus-Organism-Response paradigm (2017, background): “Earlier studies have emphasized the need to examine brand community characteristics and their impact on customer engagement (e.g., Brodie et al., 2013; De Valck et al., 2009) because these characteristics reflect a customer’s overall impression of a brand community.”
What We Know and Don't Know about Online Word-of-Mouth: A Review and Synthesis of the Literature (2014, background): “…Consumer engagement is the key to sustainable competitive advantage, profitability, and gaining consumer loyalty (Blazevic et al. 2013). eWOM platforms support collections of people in forming specialized, non-geographically bound consumer communities (De Valck, Van Bruggen, and Wierenga 2009).”
Customer engagement in a Facebook brand community (2012, methodology): “For example, previous research has shown that internet users differ in what they typically do online (Brandtzæg et al., 2011) and in their satisfaction with different types of online community behaviors (De Valck et al., 2009).”
A Critical Review of Centrality Measures in Social Networks (2010, background): “In product development and in particular in the identification of trends, the integration of members who take a central position within their network is also of great advantage since these actors have access to information about a multitude of other actors (De Valck et al. 2009, p. 185).”