Online Brand Communities and Brand Loyalty: Toward a Social Influence Theory

Online brand communities (OBCs) are gaining traction in the development of marketing strategy within the fashion industry, but it is unclear how the dominant group of users, the millennials, is responding to the prevailing and varying customer loyalty programmes. Traditionally, customers’ loyalty is measured by the volume of purchases. However, loyalty is not just based on the perceived materialistic and monetary gains a customer obtains. Loyalty also involves the strong feeling of support or allegiance that moves a customer to remain faithful with a brand despite the occurrence of a negative backlash on social media. However, customers do not have the same level of loyalty for a brand. Some even have more loyalty towards the OBC than to the brand itself. Based on the understanding that loyalty differs among groups of people within the same OBC, this chapter contributes to existing literature and provides a conceptual insight into how OBCs activate customers’ multidimensional loyalty intentions towards fashion brands. Based on customers’ experience within OBCs from the fashion industry, this chapter identifies different levels of loyalty towards fashion brands which can indicate millennial customers’ loyalty intentions. From this we can identify the diverse attitudes and actions that separate millennial customers into sub-groups based on their loyalty intentions.