Alignment - Managing Brand Identity in Online Communities

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to explore how brand managers align their brand identity within online brand communities where the communication is shared in order to create a reinforcing point of contact instead of a source of mixed messages. Problem: With the increasing usage of the internet, brand managers are today forced and challenged to align and re-enforce a brand’s identity online within its brand community, while also promoting user generated content and customer engagement. Theoretical Perspective: This thesis builds upon brand management theory literature related to online and offline brand communities covering brand identity, alignment, integrated marketing communication and the Net Promoter Score. Furthermore the research is build upon Kapferer’s Brand Identity Prism (Kapferer, 2007) together with Hanlon’s 7 keys to a successful brand community (Hanlon, 2006). Methodology: An exploratory research approach with a triangulative mixed methods case study design is to be applied for this study. The information were gathered from three main sources: primary data were collected from interviews with the marketing managers from Life is good, Peak Performance and Timberland, quantitative online questionnaires were distributed to the members of the respective brands’ online communities and observations were to be carried out from each brand’s online community for 50 days. Secondary data were mainly collected from relevant journal articles, websites and textbooks. Empirical Data: Quantitative and qualitative data was collected over 50 days using semi-structured interviews with brand managers; online questionnaires distributed to the members of the online brand communities in focus and non-participant observations of the selected Facebook fan-sites. Conclusion: This study sought to create brand identity prisms from marketing managers and compare them with the corresponding brand identity prisms of the community members to evaluate the brand alignment. The results showed that there were gaps in the brand identity and the brand image based on the prism comparisons. The identified gaps did not show that any of the brands had an identity crisis, but there were areas of the prisms that could be improved for all three companies in focus. Based on the prism comparison, Hanlon’s 7 foundations and the Net Promoter Score, respectively Life is good seemed to have the strongest brand alignment, sense of community and loyalty. Timberland was in-between in all factors, while Peak Performance had strong alignment but the weakest brand community and Net Promoter Score of the three. From our findings in the exploratory study, we created a model called the Brand Community Prism combining Hanlon’s 7 foundations of a brand community and Kapferer’s Brand Identity Prism. This prism is to be used to assess the strength of the sense of community based on evaluations of each foundation and hereby create better-aligned communication of the brand while strengthening brand loyalty and brand relationship