Guest article by Leonhard Mandl, Finalist of the Best Service Dissertation Award 2018 by SERVSIG and Maastricht University
Apple, Tupperware, Harley Davidson, Airbnb, Lego – all these success stories have one shared secret: The members of the brand community around these companies unite a strong brand community identification (BCI), which creates significant social and emotional ties between fellow customers in a sense of belonging to something greater than the individual, and the feeling of being part of a vibrant and caring family (Fournier, 1998).
As a young researcher, there is especially one brand community which fascinates me: By creating the community “people of tomorrow”, the Tomorrowland Festival in Belgium has grown to be the largest three-day music festival worldwide, selling over 400,000 festival tickets starting at $528 in less than one hour. The customer’s identification with the community of the “people of tomorrow” is the indispensable component of the standout experience that constitutes the firm’s brand image and predominantly impacts ticket and merchandising sales. This feeling of connectedness and belongingness is captured by the theoretical concept of brand community identification and might be the Tomorrowland’s key differentiator to other music events and festivals of that kind.
There are various positive consequences for service firms stemming from customers strongly identifying themselves with a brand community (Algesheimer et al., 2005). Customers having a strong brand community identification (BCI) might build long-lasting and profitable customer-firm relationships and give importance to maintain and stabilize their brand community membership (Muniz & Schau, 2005). However, It is also suggested that a customer’s strong connection to other customers will buffer perceptions of bad quality (Bhattacharya & Sen, 2003) and that customers with a strong identification with the brand and brand community might be resilient to negative information about the service provider (Elbedweihy et al., 2016). So far, service literature focused on the role of close customer-firm relationships and their mitigating or amplifying effect on customer responses to negative information in form of service failures and recovery (Grégoire & Fisher, 2008; Hogreve et al., 2017). Close customer-customer relationships have been assumed to show a considerable impact on a customer’s service experience and perceptions of service failures (Vorhees et al., 2017), but these findings neither have been transferred to the social environment of brand communities nor tested empirically in the field.
One of my dissertation projects quantifies the effect of BCI on repurchase intentions as well as the moderating effect of BCI on the negative repercussions of a service failure on repurchase intentions and the mediating effect of customer citizenship behaviors. Customer citizenship behaviors function as the connector which helps us to understand the social and psychological process what finally leads customers with strong BCI to repurchase a certain brand although the service experience might been negatively affected by a service failure event.
The setting of both field studies was a three-day music festival with more than 12,000 visitor and they reveal two crucial results: First, BCI has a positive effect on customers’ repurchase intentions as mediated by customer citizenship behavior. Second, this study examines the buffering effect of BCI on the negative effect of service failures on repurchase intentions. Thus, customers who have a strong relationship with fellow customers seem to perceive service failures as less severe than do customers who do not have a strong connection with other brand community members
This article considerably extends prior knowledge on BCI and its role in service failure episodes. Thus, customers strongly identifying themselves with the brand community are motivated to engage in positive citizenship behaviors and contribute to an individual’s positive service experience. This service experience is also protected against service failure incidents as customers are more tolerant towards service quality shortcomings and customers like to maintain their relationship with the brand community instead of fulfilling their service recovery expectations.
The good thing about this dissertation project was to combine the delightful hobby of organizing electronic music events with doing delightful research. Therefore, I always used this unique opportunity for doing research. And it was fascinating to observe the great contribution of research to the development of this three-day festival. Someone said to me “Once you’re on a rollercoaster, it’s pretty hard to get off” – and the passion about this close connection of research and practice is a great ride.
Dr. Leonhard Mandl
External Postdoc at KU Eichstaett-Ingolstadt, Germany
& Finalist Liam Glynn Research Scholarship Award
Sources:
Algesheimer, R., Dholakia, U. M., & Herrmann, A. (2005). The social influence of brand community: Evidence from European car clubs. Journal of Marketing, 69, 19-34.
Elbedweihy, A. M., Jayawardhena, C., Elsharnouby, M. H., & Elsharnouby, T. H. (2016). Customer relationship building: The role of brand attractiveness and consumer-brand identification. Journal of Business Research, 69, 2901-2910.
Fournier, S. (1998). Consumers and their brands: Developing relationship theory in consumer research. Journal of Consumer Research, 24, 343-353.
Grégoire, Y., & Fisher, R. J. (2008). Customer betrayal and retaliation: When your best customers become your worst enemies. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 36, 247-261.
Hogreve, J., Bilstein, N., & Mandl, L. (2017). Unveiling the recovery time zone of tolerance: when time matters in service recovery. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 45, 866-883.
Muñiz, A. M. Jr., & Schau, H. J. (2005). Religiosity in the abandoned Apple Newton brand community. Journal of Consumer Research, 31, 737-747.
Vorhees, C. M., Fombelle, P. W., Grégoire, Y., Bone, S., Gustafsson, A., Sousa, R., & Walkowiak, T. (2017). Service encounters, experiences and the customer journey: Defining the field and a call to expand our lens. Journal of Business Research, 79, 269-280.
