BE SOCIAL AND BE TUNED EVALUATE YOUR BRANDS IN ONLINE COMMUNITIES

The life of a brand is both physical and virtual; it more and more is being played out in online markets, where it seeks to unfold all its relational potential (Aaker, 1999). Brands are experienced in virtual consumer communities which are interactive places populated by consumers who share information, perceptions and, thus, also sensations (Szmigin, Canning & Reppel, 2005). The information they provide can drive companies in reconstructing consumer behaviors and in understanding how consumers relate with brands (Muniz & O’Guinn, 2011). A topic that recent studies (Mollen & Wilson, 2010; Brodie, Ilic, Juric & Hollebeek, 2013) investigate is the engagement that a brand produces among consumers. It is seen as the level of a customer’s cognitive, emotional and behavioral investment in specific brand interactions (Hollebeck, 2011, p. 6). If investigated in online contexts, this engagement can take on, according to Mollen and Wilson (2010), the form of cognitive and affective commitment to an active relationship with the brand as personified by the website or other computer-mediated entities designed to communicate brand value (p. 5). The cognitive engagement identifies the consumer’s degree of positive brand-related affects in a particular consumer/brand interaction, while the emotional engagement translates into a consumer’s level of brand-related thought processing and elaboration in a particular consumer/brand interaction (Hollebeek, Glynn & Brodie, 2014, p. 154). Both are distinct from behavioral engagement, which most attracts the attention of businesses; this is in fact given by the time and energy the consumer spends in interacting with the brand. All these are closely interrelated. Today there is a diffusion of monitoring platforms that measure a kind of general engagement a brand generates on the web and thus, how much online consumers speak about it. But alone these data do not provide enough details to make brand decisions (Murdough, 2009). They should be compared with other information that makes it possible to 1) monica.faraoni@unifi.it 216 2017 Global Fashion Management Conference at Vienna Proceedings interpret them in an objective way. This information may concern data on the alignment between the brand as it is perceived by consumers and the brand as it is defined by the company. They emerge from interdisciplinary research methods applied to online communities (Crawford Camiciottoli, Ranfagni & Guercini, 2014); their production allows to fill research gaps emerging in the studies on brand image. These studies in fact, explore the impact of marketing choices on brand perception without comparing the ensuing consumers’ brand associations with those that company defines and communicates (Häubl & Elrod, 1999; Schoormans & Robben, 1997; Czellar, 2003). Moreover, the brand perception is investigated not through online research techniques but through the conventional ones belonging to qualitative or quantitative methods (Till, Baack & Waterman, 2011). Regardless of the method, measurements that synthetize brand image versus brand identity matching are important as the level of brand equity and thus, the differential response to the marketing of a brand depends on their values (Keller, 1993; Erdem, 2016; Venkat, and Kerimcan, 2016). In this paper we illustrate how to build specific indicators of brand alignment by exploring online communities and how to use them in a combined way with data on the related brand social engagement (resulting from Talkwalker and Social Mention) in order to provide information that can serve to adequate orient branding policies. We focus the analysis on the traits of brand personality and thus on the “set of human characteristics associated with a brand” (Aaker, 1997, p. 347) that makes the brand a “brand persona” (Herskovitz & Crystal, 2010). Moreover the context of the analysis is the world of fashion. Here, the online communities are digital platforms where consumers interact intensively and animate discussions exchanging ideas and information (Boyd, Okleshen & Tolson, 2007; Rickman & Cosenza, 2007).