The Effect of Social Media on Brand Community Markers, Value Creation Practice, Brand Trust and Brand Loyalty (Case Study: Comparison between Apple (Iphone) and Samsung’s (Galaxy) Mobile)

Subject Areas : Jounal of Marketing Management

S. A. Mousavi ¹ , M. Kenarehfard ²

1 - استاد مدعو دانشگاه آزاد اسلامی، واحد علوم تحقیقات فارس، گروه مدیریت و حسابداری، فارس، ایران
2 - دانشجوی کارشناسی ارشد، دانشگاه آزاد اسلامی واحد علوم تحقیقات فارس، گروه مدیرت و حسابداری، فارس، ایران

Received: 2014-12-19 Accepted : 2014-12-19 Published : 2014-12-22

Keywords: Brand community, Social media, Brand Loyalty, Value creation practices, Community markers, Brand trust,

Abstract :

The combination of both brand community and social media leads to a concept that we call social media based brand community which is a subset of the broader concept of ‘‘virtual communities’’ or online brand communities; but the main differentiator is their platforms. In this article, we explore whether brand communities based on social media (a special type of online brand communities) have positive effects on the main community elements and value creation practices in the communities as well as on brand trust and brand loyalty. For this purpose the users of Apple (Iphone) and Samsung (Galaxy) cell phones in Shiraz are considered as the statistical society which due to the unlimited statistical society and lack of access to all of them, two samples included 196 people has been selected randomly and studied in the third 3 months of year 91 by using the standard questionnaire of the researcher Michael Laroch et al. (2012). On the other hand in order to discuss the relation between the research variables the Pierson correlation and for the hypothesis test of research the path analyze are used to evaluate the structure of the recommended framework. In order to do this SPSS Amos 16.0 software is used. This research has about twenty hypothesis which are after the hypothesis analyze and statistical analysis at the surety level of 95%  for the Apple’s customer eighteen hypothesis were accepted and two of them were rejected, and for the customers of Samsung, sixteen hypothesis were accepted and four of them were rejected.