Luxury brands and online consumer-generated content: dealing with the new lead of customers in brand perception

User-generated content – conteúdo gerado por usuários – cresceu consideravelmente na Internet nos cinco últimos anos, levando a grandes mudanças nas práticas de marketing. A força do e-word-of mouth, está aumentando e tem uma influência muito forte na percepção da marca pelos consumidores (Allsop, Basset & Hoskins, 2007). Todos os novos instrumentos fornecidos pela Internet permitiram a criação de comunidades de marca online, impactando o compromisso e a lealdade dos consumidores para com a marca (De Valk, Van Bruggen, Wierenga 2009). Todas essas interações criadas entre os consumidores e a marca são relativamente novas e incomuns para as empresas que devem adaptar suas práticas de marketing a essas mudanças. Dadas as especificidades que aplicam as marcas de luxo nas suas políticas de marketing (Kapferer and Bastien, 2009), a questão da adaptação das suas estratégias ao fenômeno de user-generated content é particularmente complicada. As marcas de luxo costumam ter habitualmente uma relação muito reservada com os seus consumidores, baseada em princípios de exclusividade e raridade (Kapferer, 1997). Esta dissertação busca proporcionar algumas pistas de entendimento sobre como as marcas de cosméticos de luxo podem adaptar suas estratégias de marketing em relação à expansão do conteúdo gerado por usuários na Internet. Esta pesquisa qualitativa sugere meios de controlar o conteúdo gerado por usuários, como o incentivar positivamente com certas práticas de marketing e como tirar proveito dele. A seguinte análise mostra que o conteúdo gerado por usuários tem duas facetas: pode atuar como um mídia digital para as empresas de luxo e como uma fonte de informação, inspiração e criação para o desenho dos novos produtos. Sendo um meio de comunicação, as empresas de cosméticos de luxo podem contar com a nova potência do “e-word-of-mouth” a fim de promover sua imagem de marca e seus produtos através do conteúdo gerado por usuários. Sendo uma fonte de inspiração, o conteúdo gerado por usuários pode conduzir a ótimos processos de co-criação e cooperação entre as marcas de cosméticos de luxo e seus consumidores com o objetivo de projetar produtos perfeitamente ajustados ao pedido dos consumidores.

Co-creation in hospitality industry: a case study on the drivers of traveler-generated content

User-generated content in travel industry is the phenomenon studied in this research, which aims to fill the literature gap on the drivers to write reviews on TripAdvisor. The object of study is relevant from a managerial standpoint since the motivators that drive users to co-create can shape strategies and be turned into external leverages that generate value for brands through content production. From an academic perspective, the goal is to enhance literature on the field, and fill a gap on adherence of local culture to UGC given industry structure specificities. The business’ impact of UGC is supported by the fact that it increases e-commerce conversion rates since research undertaken by Ye, Law, Gu and Chen (2009) states each 10% in traveler review ratings boosts online booking in more than 5%. The literature review builds a theoretical framework on required concepts to support the TripAdvisor case study methodology. Quantitative and qualitative data compound the methodological approach through literature review, desk research, executive interview, and user survey which are analyzed under factor and cluster analysis to group users with similar drivers towards UGC. Additionally, cultural and country-specific aspects impact user behavior. Since hospitality industry in Brazil is concentrated on long tail – 92% of hotels in Brazil are independent ones (Jones Lang LaSalle, 2015, p. 7) – and lesser known hotels take better advantage of reviews – according to Luca (2011) each one Yelp-star increase in rating, increases in 9% independent restaurant revenue whereas in chain restaurants the reviews have no effect – , this dissertation sought to understand UGC in the context of travelers from São Paulo (Brazil) and adopted the case of TripAdvisor to describe what are the incentives that drives user’s co-creation among targeted travelers. It has an outcome of 4 different clusters with different drivers for UGC that enables to design marketing strategies, and it also concludes there’s a big potential to convert current content consumers into producers, the remaining importance of friends and family referrals and the role played by incentives. Among the conclusions, this study lead us to an exploration of positive feedback and network effect concepts, a reinforcement of the UGC relevance for long tail hotels, the interdependence across content production, consumption and participation; and the role played by technology allied with behavioral analysis to take effective decisions. The adherence of UGC to hospitality industry, also outlines the formulation of the concept present in the dissertation title of “Traveler-Generated Content”.

Content marketing and brand engagement on social media: a study of Facebook´s posts in the ecommerce industry in Brazil

Content marketing refers to marketing format that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content in order to acquire customers. It is focused not on selling, but on communicating with customers and prospects. In today world´s, a trend has been seen in brands becoming publishers in order to keep up with their competition and more importantly to keep their base of fans and followers. Content Marketing is making companies to engage consumers by publishing engaging and value-filled content. This study aims to investigate if there is a link between brand engagement and Facebook Content Marketing practices in the e-commerce industry in Brazil. Based on the literature review, this study defines brand engagement on Facebook as the numbers of "likes" "comments" and "shares" that a company receives from its fans. These actions reflect the popularity of the brand post and leads to engagement. The author defines a scale where levels of Content Marketing practices are developed in order to analyze brand posts on Facebook of an ecommerce company in Brazil. The findings reveal that the most important criterion for the company is the one regarding the picture of the post, where it examines whether the photo content is appealing to the audience. Moreover, it was perceived that the higher the level of these criterion in a post, the greater the number of likes, comments and shares the post receives. The time when a post is published does not present a significant role in determining customer engagement and the most important factor within a publication is to reach the maximum level in the Content Marketing Scale.

The impact of content marketing on attitudes and purchase intentions of online shoppers : the case videos & tutorials and user-generated content

This thesis was written as part of a Double-Degree Masters program in Management, with focus in Marketing. Aligned with the nature of the degree, this study aims to be a useful tool for managers and marketers, which conduct business online. This thesis is a study of Content Marketing in the content of online commercial product pages. Its aim is to understand how to use content marketing to drive conversion, by understanding consumer attitudes and purchase intention towards content. A in-depth study of existing theories and exploratory primary research was developed in other to attain these objectives. Business-to-consumer electronic commerce (B2C e-commerce) has provided consumers and online retailers with a more effective medium to perform online transactions through commercial websites. Although consumers have realized that the benefits of online shopping; such as time saving, minimizing effort, convenience, broader selection, and wider access to information, they are still greatly unwilling to shop online. Consumers shop essentially for two motives, to meet experiential (fun) or goal-oriented (efficiency) needs (Wolfinbarger & Gilly, 2001). The information provided by content marketing seeks to focus on consumers need for information and entertainment, instead of focusing on the brand. Thus, it is expected that the type of content format will have different effects on the attitudes and purchase intention on the online shopper, depending on the online shopping purpose. Concretely, a goal-oriented shopper should find user generated content (UGC) to be more valuable content formats, since they decrease the amount of search effort. While on the other hand, videos & tutorials (VT) might be perceived as more valuable for a consumer looking to spend time and being entertained through online shopping. The exploratory research was characterized by a survey experiment with online consumers. Participants were exposed to stimuli of content marketing tested according to their attitudes and purchase intention. The focus was to understand the impact of two different content marketing tactics—User-generated content and Videos & Tutorials—on attitudes and purchase intentions and how they interact with content complexity. The results indicate that content marketing in commercial product pages is relevant in driving consumer attitudes and purchase intentions. Consumers are not motivated by a specific content marketing tactic, unless that content has a certain level of complexity. In that case, Ur-Generated Content becomes a relevant tactic in product pages, however VT is not.