Analysis of consumers’ response to brand community integration and brand identification

Brands play an increasingly important role in consumers’ purchasing decisions. The integration of consumers into brand communities may manifest the ultimate degree of connectedness between a consumer and a brand. This article proposes and tests an empirical framework of brand community members’ integration and theirdistinctive behaviors. The specific aim of this study is to analyze the influence of brand community integration on brand identification and to show how brand identificationinfluences satisfaction, loyalty and word-of-mouth communications. The sample consisted of 450 subjects from three different brand communities (Iphone, Thermomix andNespresso). The results confirm the influence of brand community integration on brand identification and consumer satisfaction. We additionally discovered that brand identification has an effect on consumer loyalty and word-of-mouth communications. The findings contribute to consumer and brand literature and may have implications for brand community managemen

Hitting the Ground Running: Group Simulations within Business School Cohorts

Within an ever more marketised Higher Education (HE) landscape, business students are focusing increasingly on the Graduate Premium, balancing the costs of their programmes against expected benefits such as facilitated entry into, and progression within, fulfilling and well remunerated business careers. As such, educators are charged with differentiating their programmes from those of other institutions, not only to attract more applicants, but also to give their graduates a competitive advantage in the marketplace. The use of simulations as a learning and assessment strategy within business schools is widespread and growing. The purpose of this chapter is to analyse the debate surrounding the use of such technology, identifying pedagogical benefits and potential limitations, and to critique how such technology may be harnessed to provide more transparent pathways to professionalism for today’s diverse and demanding students. In particular, it considers some of the key challenges experienced by students in using simulations, as they adapt to the new social and learning cultures