Online Brand Community Engagement (OBCE): A Literature Review on Co-creational Perspective

Abstract

Social media has a great impact on individuals and organisations in the current economy. Both, consumers and organisations heavily rely on social media for promotions and other corporate communications. Social media engagement generally increases the consumer satisfaction, loyalty, retention, customer lifetime value, share of wallet and profitability of an organisation. In addition, activities such as blogging and sharing instructional videos and product photos on social media platforms, aid to generate the content, communicate it, outreach and referral to increase web traffic, awareness and popularity of brands. Consumer engagement studies on social media is important because, unlike traditional media, social media is highly interactive, is built on social linkages and often participation on social media is voluntary. Habitually, the engagement occurs unconsciously and unintentionally, yet it provides dynamic and distinctive connections between firms and the consumers contrary to traditional media. The research conducted on this topic in other countries have explained this using service-dominant logic, consumer culture theory and the theory of co-creation. However, it is argued that the existing theories that are available to explain the co- creation lacks conceptual clarity, and requires further academic investigation. Therefore, this paper attempts to contribute to the academic inquiry of online brand community engagement using co-creation literature.