Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
is through random acts of kindness designed to produce customer gratitude. Gratitude is a
powerful, and potentially quite profi table, emotion to inspire (Palmatier, Burke, Bechkoff and
Kardes 2009). The
airline's 'How Happiness Spreads' campaign of 2010 employed a 'Surprise
Team' to give passengers tailored, unexpected gifts at the airport (Trendwatching 2011). When
passengers checked in at KLM's Foursquare locations, the KLM Surprise team used social
networks such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook to fi nd out information about the passenger.
The KLM Surprise team then used this information to come up with a personalized gift to
surprise the passenger with. The team followed up after surprising a passenger by monitoring
the conversation generated on social networks by that person and their friends. They also took
photos of the people they had surprised and posted them to the KLM Facebook page. KLM
has previously proven its social media savvy with a popular Facebook application allowing
users to create luggage tags using their Facebook photos. In 2006 the company had another
success with an award winning viral video for its Fly for Fortune game.
Virgin Atlantic Airways (VAA) is another airline that is leveraging the power of social media
to reinforce its brand (Barwise and Meehan 2010). TheVAA customer promise is innovation, fun,
informality, honesty, value and a caring attitude. VAA uses social media to support these brand
values. For example, the most-read section of its Facebook page includes travel tips from crew
members - communication that comes across as honest, informal and caring. VAA builds trust
by delivering on that promise. Trust is mainly about service delivery, but when things go wrong,
keeping customers informed can prevent that trust from eroding. During the volcanic-ash crisis
in 2010, VAA's website couldn't keep pace with the rapidly changing situation, so it used
Facebook and Twitter to communicate with customers.
Another type of social media is the online brand community. Brand communities are defi ned
as 'specialized, non-geographically bound communities, based on a structured set of social
relationships among admirers of a brand' (Bagozzi and Dholakie 2006: 45). The emergence of
brand communities has coincided with the growth in consumer empowerment. They are venues
where intense brand loyalty is expressed and fostered, and emotional connection with the brand
forged in customers. Research on such communities has found that commitment to a brand can
be infl uenced (positively) by encouraging interactions with groups of like-minded customers
and identifi cation with the group in social context offered (and sponsored) by the fi rm and the
brand, but controlled and managed primarily by the consumers themselves.
As use of the Internet becomes more pervasive, so too have online brand communities
become effective tools for infl uencing sales. One study of online brand communities (Adjei,
Noble and Noble 2010) found that the quality of the communication exchanged between
customers reduces the level of uncertainty about the fi rm and its products, which relates to
increased profi ts for the fi rm in terms of immediate purchase intentions, and the number of
products purchased. It also found that the impact of negative information is not as strong as the
benefi ts of positive information. So maintaining a brand community that allows customers to
know the fi rm more intimately through peer-to-peer conversations will work in the fi rm's
favour, even if negative information is shared.
A challenge in building and managing online brand communities is that consumers can
easily associate marketers' efforts with extrinsic motives of profi t exploitation and thus become
less likely to engage with, and contribute to, such a community (Algesheimer, Dholakia
and Herrmann 2005; Lee, Kim and Kim 2011). One possible solution is to develop a platform
of online brand communities encouraging consumers to voluntarily share and exchange
their ideas rather than imposing the organization's own ideas, such as sales coupons or sweep-
stakes. This implies that marketers should employ a passive role when facilitating brand
communities.
