As I promised last week, here is our research framework – the one we will stick with.
As you can see, most of the same puzzle pieces are still there, we just added something new to the mix. We will still focus on web 2.0 with it’s impact on customer participation and the way marketers can leverage this thru brand communities, but now we are concentrating also on the consumers view on this: what are the antecedents of making that UGC-effort. We have chosen the MOA-theory (motivation, opportunity, ability) by MacInnis & Jaworski (1989) as the basis of understanding consumer contribution, and we’ll concentrate on the motivation in our empirical study.
From the figure you can also see marketers control on the different items. Although we have argued that there is a change happening in the form of control shifting from marketers to consumers, we are not saying that marketers would be left out cold. Yes, maybe you can’t have an effect on the whole web 2.0 or the participation of customers directly, but you can affect them indirectly thru your own brand community. And yes, you may not be able to increase consumer participation in your online community by giving them a computer with an access to internet (opportunity) or teaching them how to use it (ability), but you can give them something that motivates them once they have the devices and the know-how (which most of us do have these days).
This is what we’ll start wrapping up in the coming weeks. Here you can also take a look at how we are going to structure the whole thing in chapters.
Tags: Brand communities, MOA-theory, research framework, thesis, Web 2.0
