Experience

An e-SME’s social media community provides consumers with the opportunity to create and maintain relationships with the e-SME brand and communicate with other customers. When consumers ‘follow’ or ‘join’ an e-SME’s social media community, they are actively choosing to be exposed to the brand’s content. As well as the experiences/emotions that other consumers (that follow the brand) have had with the brand and its offerings. Table 4.5 highlights the e- SME posts which encouraged consumers to share experiences.

139 Table 4.5 E-SME Posts Which Encouraged Consumers to Share Experiences

Five of the e-SMEs did not adopt this approach, however e-SMEs such as Sportshoes, Surfdome and Probikekit encouraged consumers to pass on experiences by asking them to share emotions such as inspiration, as well as asking consumers about their future aspirations, Examples are highlighted in Figure 4.5. Whilst this construct was evident in the findings it did not appear to reproduce the same results for organisations such as The Soccer Store or Kitbag. Therefore further analysis was required to validate the construct and will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter Seven.

Figure 4.5 -Shared Experience Examples

e-SME-Shared experience Facebook Facebook engagement Twitter Twitter engagement Google + Google + engagement YouTube YouTube engagememt Instagram Instagram engagement Pinterest Pinterest engagemnet

The Soccer Store 3 0 2 0 2 0 n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a

Surfdome 6 487 0 0 0 0 n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a

Sportsjamkits 0 0 0 0 n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a

Sportshoes 7 91 0 0 n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a

ProBikeKit 2 664 6 36 n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a

Newitts 0 0 0 0 n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a

Kitbag 2 0 24 96 n/a n/a 0 0 3 36 n/a n/a

Fitsense 0 0 0 0 n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a

Chelston Direct 0 0 0 0 0 0 n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a

Direct Soccer 1 1 6 0 n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a Direct Teamwear 0 0 0 0 n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a Fitness Footwear 0 0 0 0 n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a

140 These types of social media posts encouraged significant engagement in the way of ‘likes’ and comments on Facebook as highlighted in Table 4.5. The findings show that high engagement can be achieved by e-SMEs actively encouraging consumers to share experiences and emotions with the brand on social media. Although six of the e-SMEs adopted this approach, it could be argued that this does not represent theoretical saturation at this stage of the research, and further analysis is required to validate the construct. However, the findings suggest that such interactions support the established constructs in the literature, whereby consumers are not just mere recipients of the products and values of the firm, but as co-creators of value, competitive strategy and the firm’s innovation processes. The findings indicate that e-SME SMBCs positively influence these value creation practices. This research has also found that practices such as sharing good news stories about products and experiences, or recommending others to use the brand, create impressionable trust associations with the brand for consumers. An example of this is highlighted from Probikekit:

Consumers’ motivations for following and posting on e-SME brand social media shall be reviewed in Chapter Seven, but regardless of the consumer motivation, the findings suggest that members of an SMBC are involved in the co-creation of value with an e-SME. The netnography demonstrated two overriding emotions connected to the e-SME social media postings, namely inspiration and humour. In particular organisations such as Surfdome and The Soccer Store utilised this approach. The number of posts as well as the engagement score (collective amount of likes/retweets etc.) are presented in Table 4.6.

141 Table 4.6 Emotive Posts

e-SME social media emotion posts Humour- social media posts Humour engagement Inspiration-social media posts Inspiration engagement

The Soccer Store 66 192 5 5

Surfdome 28 2,146 14 2,206 Sportsjamkits 0 0 0 0 Sportshoes 7 313 2 0 ProBikeKit 11 409 1 62 Newitts 0 0 0 0 Kitbag 14 59 0 0 Fitsense 0 0 0 0 Chelston Direct 21 5 5 1 Direct Soccer 2 0 0 0 Direct Teamwear 0 0 0 0 Fitness Footwear 0 0 1 0 Total 149 3,124 28 2,274

Humorous posts were utilised by seven of the e-SMEs, with example posts demonstrated in Figure 4.6. This suggests that humour is a popular method for e-SMEs to develop trust with consumer audiences. Nevertheless, with organisations such as Sportshoes and Direct Teamwear choosing not to adopt this approach, this implies that some organisations perceive this to a be a high risk approach as misplaced humour can be judged to be in bad taste and negatively received by consumers. Humour is subjective, however it could be suggested that if the e-SME brand adopts a consistent approach, when it comes to humour, as Kitbag.com utilised then it allows consumers to be accustomed to the type of messages they view. This approach could be deemed effective for customers but presents a more difficult proposition for encouraging trust for non-customers.

142 The netnography demonstrated that ‘Inspiration’ posts were adopted by 6 of the selected e- SMEs, with examples highlighted in Figure 4.7.

Figure 4.7 Inspiration Posts

Surfdome scored the highest engagement scores with their ‘inspiration’ posts and whilst it has to be acknowledged that they have the largest amount of social media followers, this approach appeared to resonate with their community followers. By posting inspirational posts, such as ‘exploring’ and ‘daring’ images (that the consumer can visualise themselves achieving) they are connecting with the consumers’ hopes and ambitions which arguably lead to them trusting the brand. This suggests that inspirational posts should focus on the consumer in order to create trust.

Previous research on consumer–brand relationships has clearly demonstrated that understanding the emotional components of such relationships is highly relevant to both marketing academics and practitioners. The feelings that a brand generates have the potential to strongly differentiate one brand from another, especially as consumers usually emotionally attach to only a limited number of brands. The netnography demonstrated that e-SME brands use imagery to connect with consumers by telling stories using inspiration and humour, however further analysis is required to identify further emotions which can contribute to brand trust.