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Firm-hosted online brand communities and new product success

  • Original Empirical Research
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Abstract

Many firms use online brand communities to support the launch of their new products. This study proposes a typology of firm-hosted online brand communities and examines whether such a classification system can improve predictions of new product success. A cross-industry analysis of 81 firm-hosted online brand communities shows that these communities reflect three archetypes. A subsequent survey of 170 community-hosting firms in the consumer durable goods industry reveals that the three types of communities are not equally important for new product success. Moreover, one archetype generally underperforms the other two as a new product support mechanism. Overall, the results demonstrate that firm-hosted online brand communities can be a predictor of new product success.

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Notes

  1. The literature contains other attempts to classify online communities. For example, Correll (1995) developed four types of online community membership and participation: regulars, newbies, lurkers, and bashers. Hagel and Armstrong (1997) identified four types of online communities: communities of transaction, interest, fantasy, and relationship. These studies, however, do not (1) concentrate on online brand communities or communities hosted by firms, (2) develop a taxonomic classification system for online communities, or (3) examine whether online communities are related to new product success.

  2. Product innovativeness and entry timing can interact with each other as contingencies. For example, a product may be late and incrementally innovative or late and radically innovative. To comply with space limitations, we do not address such interaction combinations and instead focus conceptually and empirically on the likely contingency effects of each factor separately. This approach enables us to establish a basic understanding of each factor’s individual contingency effects for future research.

  3. We note that in one instance, a pairwise comparison involving the Restricted OBC variable is statistically only marginally significant (p = .079; Table 4).

  4. Online communities that served other purposes than to establish relationships with customers and enhance new product success, such as corporate research (e.g., communispace.com) or open-source software development (see Hemetsberger and Reinhardt 2009) were not part of our content analysis.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Elizabeth Anderson, Robin Canniford, Sue Finch, Veronika Gouskova, Martin Klarmann, and Mirco Sydow for their insightful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management and Marketing, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

    Richard L. Gruner, Christian Homburg & Bryan A. Lukas

  2. Business Administration and Marketing, University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany

    Christian Homburg

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  1. Richard L. Gruner
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  2. Christian Homburg
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Correspondence to Richard L. Gruner.

Appendices

Appendix 1

Content Analysis

First research phase: Identification of distinguishing dimensions of firm-hosted online brand communities

  1. Step 1

    In the first step of this research phase, a content analysis of the brand community literature identified the dimensions of firm-hosted online brand communities. Relevant literature on organizational behavior and change (e.g., Hellriegel and Slocum 2004), organizational and corporate culture (e.g., Deshpandé et al. 1993), and personal and social psychology (e.g., Lickel et al. 2001) was also reviewed. As can be seen in the Appendix Table (see Step 1) at the end of this Appendix, 19 dimensions were identified.

  2. Step 2

    In this step, the three co-authors of this study discussed which of the 19 dimensions derived from the literature could be used to distinguish persistent differences among firm-hosted online brand communities. As a result of these deliberations, six dimensions (see Step 2 in Appendix Table) were removed, leaving 13 OBC dimensions for further consideration.

  3. Step 3

    Next, three 30-minute focus groups were conducted to review and validate the remaining 13 dimensions. The focus group size ranged from 9 to 12 managers from the consumer durable goods industry. One new community dimension—community access—was proposed during the second focus group and confirmed by the third group. Further, the managers concluded that four (see Step 3 in Appendix Table) of the 13 dimensions “surviving” Step 2 were not relevant for the purpose of defining potential archetypes of firm-hosted online brand communities. Ten potentially relevant OBC-defining dimensions remained after this step.

  4. Step 4

    This step of the study was a content analysis of actual firm-hosted OBCs, with the objective of establishing which of the remaining 10 dimensions were capable of revealing any systematic differences among firm-hosted online brand communities. By way of searches through google.com, yahoo.com, and ask.com, firm-hosted OBCs from a broad range of industries were studied.Footnote 4 The firm-hosted OBCs also differed in size (ranging from fewer than 100 members to more than 10,000 members), geographic scope, features, and product categories. To further improve the generalizability of the study, our examination extended to firm-hosted OBCs beyond those with high post-traffic and a large number of discrete message posters.

    Three types of data were collected. First, community postings were tracked for up to six months and, whenever available, guidelines were downloaded. In a few cases, the authors repeatedly failed to gain community access and, therefore, directly contacted the firms hosting the OBCs to obtain more community information. The second type of data was collected by observing the OBC, its members, and members’ interactions. Particular attention was paid to community rules and guidelines such as those regulating members’ and visitors’ access to community content. The degree to which firms moderated messages posted by community members was also monitored. The third type of data was generated when further clarification about the content of an online interaction was required. In such cases, community members were directly engaged via the OBC platform or by telephone.

    After analyzing 81 firm-hosted OBCs, the three co-authors agreed that more community analyses were not likely to yield further insights into the dimensionality of firm-hosted online brand communities. The analysis of the firm-hosted OBCs established that of the 10 community dimensions derived from the first three research steps, six dimensions did not display strong enough variation in their manifestation levels across the 81 firm-hosted OBCs to warrant their further consideration for establishing whether archetypes of firm-hosted OBCs could be identified (see Step 4 in Appendix Table). The remaining four dimensions revealed persistent differences among the firm-hosted OBCs (see final results from the four research steps in Appendix Table).

Second research phase: Identification of archetypes of firm-hosted online brand communities

For the second phase of the research process, the three co-authors classified each of the 81 firm-hosted OBCs as “high,” “moderate,” or “low” on each of the four remaining community dimensions (i.e., community access, activity control, host integration, and member engagement) found in the first research phase. As a result, three archetypical OBCs emerged along the four dimensions, which we labeled Open OBC, Discerning OBC, and Restricted OBC. The OBC types are profiled in the main body of the paper, and a summary profile can be found in Table 2.

Two validation procedures were applied to the emergence of the three OBC types. The first validation procedure required four research assistants with a background in qualitative research methods to serve as judges. To this end, the judges’ task was to replicate the co-authors’ classification steps by re-classifying the 81 firm-hosted OBCs as “high,” “moderate,” or “low” on the final four community dimensions. The three OBC types were confirmed by this procedure. Interjudge reliability was assessed with the percentage of agreement between the judges (i.e., the ratio of number of agreements and total number of items). The minimum percentage of interjudge reliability obtained was 78%.

The second validation procedure involved a cluster analysis. To generate the data for the analysis, we hired four experts: a community researcher, a digital media manager who worked on biotech projects at the authors’ shared university and was directly involved in the development of online brand communities, and two research assistants who were active members of several firm-hosted OBCs and corporate networking sites.

The four experts visited the 81 firm-hosted OBCs and rated them on a scale from 1 to 7 on the 10 community dimensions derived in the third research step of the first research phase. To avoid the experts becoming fatigued from visiting the 81 firm-hosted OBCs, and to control research costs, we instructed participants to explore the firm-hosted OBCs in four sessions and not to spend more than 15 min on each community. We also required the experts to review the firm-hosted OBCs in alphabetical order.

We used cluster analysis to explore the data, relying on hierarchical clustering using Ward’s method. The dendrogram showed that three clusters emerge. This additional analysis confirmed the existence of three types of online brand communities. To keep the length of the paper within editorial guidelines, we do not report the detailed results of the cluster analysis.

Table 5 Community dimensions: the identification and elimination process
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Appendix 2

Table 6 Measurement of firm-hosted online brand communities
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Appendix 3

Table 7 Dependent, moderator, and control variables
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Gruner, R.L., Homburg, C. & Lukas, B.A. Firm-hosted online brand communities and new product success. J. of the Acad. Mark. Sci. 42, 29–48 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-013-0334-9

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