Innovative Roles of Brand Community Members: A Typology Based on Cluster Analysis

Conference paper
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Abstract

This research applied Ward’s method to cluster analyze 319 samples collected from online brand community of Apple. Two variables, brand identification and community identification are used to categorize the samples into 4 clusters. Average scores of 15 innovative activities of each cluster are analyzed and thus find the different innovative roles played by brand community members: outside learners, pragmatic explorers, silent devotees and opinion leaders.

Keywords

Brand identification Cluster analysis Community identification Innovative roles Online brand community Typology 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

This research has been supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant71072080.

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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.School of ManagementHuazhong University of Science and TechnologyWuhanPeople’s Republic of China
  2. 2.School of Economics and ManagementChina University of GeosciencesWuhanPeople’s Republic of China

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