PhD Oral Exam - Mohammad Reza Habibi, Business Administration

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the notion of brand communities that are established on social media platforms. Social media has changed marketing practices from information acquisition to post purchase behavior; therefore, it is necessary for marketing scholars and practitioners to update our marketing knowledge according to this new changes. This thesis suggests the brand community lens as a proper and legitimate perspective to study marketing and branding activities on social media platforms because the essence of social media is associated with collective and community building. The first paper of this manuscript not only supports the existential possibilities of brand communities on social media but also more importantly it explores the unique aspects of social media that could interact with brand community practices and argue why we should examine brand community in this new context of social media.

The first paper conducts an in-depth qualitative study in two rich brand-generated communities on social media and analyzes their brand community elements and practices. The study shows the qualities of brand community elements, structural relationships (McAlexander et al. 2002) and value creation practices (Schau et al. 2009) within these communities and extract some unique characteristics of the social media based brand communities that differ from their traditional counterparts. The study concludes five unique dimensions that make social media based brand communities (SMBBCs) distinguished from other offline/online counterparts and argues that this is why brand community researchers should treat brand communities on social media differently and study this phenomena separately. We need to update our understanding of brand community to suit the unique aspects of social media.

The second and third papers employ a quantitative approach to show how these communities can influence important marketing variables such as brand trust, brand relationship quality, and brand loyalty. These are marketing fundamental goals that are considered as a way to measure social media success in terms of increasing return on investment. These papers depict how different elements and building blocks of these communities on social media interact and influence trust and loyalty. The second paper shows the role of community engagement as a moderator while the third paper provides a big picture of consumer behavior in the context of brand communities that are established on social media. Several important measures such as value creation practices are developed in this paper.