Exploring the cross-cultural effect on consumer-brand relationship and engagement through social media platforms: the Kerastase example

• Autor(a) principal: Nobre, Pedro Augusto Albano
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/17883
• topic: Relationship marketing; Engagement; Website stimulus; Cross culture; Luxury; Marketing; Marketing digital; Indústria cosmética; Imagem de marca; Estratégias de marketing; Diversidade cultural; Comportamento do consumidor

The current dissertation aims to understand the impact of the cross-cultural effect on consumer-brand relationship and engagement through social media platforms. A netnography analysis was conducted concerning the interactions between the selected brand - the luxury brand Kérastase - and the respective online brand community on the Social Networking Site Facebook, during a specific period of time defined, in four different countries. The content gathering from this netnography methodology took place on the online brand community defined, and it allowed the compilation of a total of 1,547 interactions. Kérastase community members’ interactions were analysed considering these brand’s publications from January 2016 to August 2018. Our research findings revealed that all Kérastase Online Business Communities demonstrated a similar level of engagement towards the brand Social Network Site pages and seem to behave in an identical way. Notably, all countries consumers were shown to be particularly motivated by the brand overall posted content, thus suggesting a good digital marketing strategy. This research also shows that for a Luxury Brand such as Kérastase, information seeking, and people referral, emerge as the two most dominant reasons for the consumers to engage with the brand demonstrating a positive attachment. On the other hand, the less positive commentaries were related to some country operational aspects such as (new e-commerce channel, lack of product, etc). The results presented show that Companies using Facebook should look to increase the level of engagement by (1) preparing clear engagement strategies, (2) focusing on the delivery of relevant brand-related information, and (3) using people referrals on the comment sections to build a CRM data able to feed a VIP Club and create an affiliates. Despite the outcomes of the current research as well as the contributions it provides, there are some limitations that have to be considered such as a sample magnitude restricted, a limited number of Countries and social platform. In addition, this study did not a longitudinal evaluation. Acknowledging these limitations referred, the future studies should then consider them for the purpose of analysis.