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brand commitment: A case of Grand Blue Wave Hotel, Shah Alam
N.S. Shariffuddin & N.A. Ahmad
Faculty of Hotel and Tourism Management, Universiti Teknologi MARA (Shah Alam), Malaysia
ABSTRACT: Due to advance technology, social media has become the latest trend to gather informa-
tion, communication, knowledge and entertainment. Facebook has become world trend or “King” of
Social Media and becoming a popular tool for marketing. In hospitality industry, social media helps mar-
keters to market their business. By building good relationship with online communities, hotel can generate
strong commitment to their brands. However, marketers have to consider which motivational functions
that influence consumer to participate in online communities and commit toward the hotel brand. This
study employs a descriptive research design. A quantitative approach with a structured questionnaire as
the research instrument was used among fans of Grand Blue Wave Hotel Facebook page. The findings
revealed important insights on issues related to the topic of interest.
Keywords
: Brand commitment, Facebook, motivational functions, online community participation,
social media
1 INTRODUCTION
social media with traditional marketing techniques
in order to be the frontier. Hotel can generate
strong commitment to their brands by construct-
ing good relationship with online communities.
Seth (2012) supported that consumers will spend
more, get more referrals, and have higher repeat
clientele when hotels engage to their customers
via social media. In addition, hotels can track the
number of conversations that takes place over a
new product or service offered and can immedi-
ately respond to reviews, comments and feedback
(Seth, 2012). Thus, it will enable the hoteliers to
overcome the problems fast and put an effort to
improve the future brand performance.
Currently, Facebook is the world-leading Social
Network (Krahl, 2013) and statistic shows that in
April 14, 2013 Facebook had a total number of 978
million active users all over the world (socialtimes.
me, 2013) and 680 million monthly active users
who used Facebook mobile products as in Decem-
ber 31, 2012 (facebook.com, 2013). With such a
huge user base, Facebook is becoming a popular
instrument for public relations and advertising
professionals to reach mass audiences and Face-
book fan pages allow brands to create an online
community of brand users on the social network-
ing site (Bushelow, 2012).
Nowadays, owing to an advancement of technol-
ogy, social media can be considered as an exact mode
for the consumer to get the right information at the
right time (Naveed, 2012). Accordig to Paris, Lee,
and Seery (2010) social media can be defined as a
second generation of Web development and design,
with the aims to facilitate communication, secure
information sharing, interoperability, and collabora-
tion on the World Wide Web. Because social media
had reached huge numbers of people far and wide,
Hartshorn (2010) testified that it has appeared to be
very effective business instrument to involve with
consumers and can build a brand name by continu-
ous and prompt correspondence (Seth, 2012).
Lanz et al. (2010) noted that most successful
hotels are finding innovative ways to integrate
2 LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1
Online community participation
Participation in online communities can be char-
acterized as passive or active (Kang, 2011). Active
community members are those who interact with
other members as opposed to those who merely
observe information (Madupu, 2006). Passive com-
munity members are lurkers or free riders members
who browse online communities but rarely become
involved in the community activities (Preece, et al.,
2004). Moreover, lurkers tend to pursue their own
goals and merely take advantage of the benefits
of the communities (Ridings, Gefen & Arineze,
2006).
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