Participant diversity and expressive freedom in firm-managed and customer-managed brand communities

• Autor(a) principal: Almeida,Stefânia Ordovás de
• Data de Publicação: 2013
• Outros Autores: Mazzon,José Afonso, Dholakia,Utpal, Müller Neto,Hugo
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: BAR - Brazilian Administration Review
• Texto Completo: http://old.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1807-76922013000200006
• topic: brand communities; participant diversity; expressive freedom; consumer behavior

We examine differences between firm-managed and customer-managed brand communities with a conceptual model explaining how demographic and psychographic diversity of participants and their degree of expressive freedom engender trust, learning, and identification in the community, and affect firm-relevant outcomes. We test our hypotheses by estimating a structural equation model and conducting multiple sample analysis with survey data obtained from two leading XBOX brand communities in Brazil. Results reveal that greater demographic and psychographic diversity hinder learning and trust in the community's manager, but expressive freedom has a positive impact on identification with the community. The levels of expressive freedom and demographic diversity are lower yet their respective effects are stronger in the firm-managed community, whereas psychographic diversity is much less, but it has stronger negative effects, in the customer-managed community.