Communication and Social Media Management

The first paper by Maria Teresa Cuomo, Alice Mazzucchelli, Roberto Chierici, and Francesca Ceruti aims to investigate how the growth of social commerce and the fast adoption of online brand communities have given firms the opportunity to establish a new kind of community, namely, the social commerce brand community. Adopting a managerial perspective, the research aims to identify the core dimensions of social commerce brand community and shed light on how they contribute in engaging customers and transform them into brand advocates. Dorit Zimand Sheiner, and Tamar Lahav aim to focus on customer-initiated contact (CIC) discourse on Facebook brand pages. The paper investigates how brands manage CIC on Facebook when customers are more concerned with brand communications than productrelated issues, price or distribution. A paper by Sema Misci Kip and Pinar Umul Uensal aims to achieve broad insights into perceptions and attitudes of Turkish digital immigrants (DI) and digital natives (DN) towards a native advertising (NA) format. Maria Palazzo, Pantea Foroudi, Philip Kitchen, and Alfonso Siano explore the emergence, growth and importance of corporate communications and how that field is evolving and creating competitive advantage for Italian firms. The study offers insights into corporate communications (corpcoms) practices in the sampled companies. MariaTeresa Cuomo, Debora Tortora, Giuseppe Festa, Francesca Ceruti, and Metallo discuss the adoption of augmented reality (AR) settings, which represents an extraordinary opportunity to enrich the value of the omni-customer brand experience, especially in fashion retail. AR enhances the brand of extra-contents, both informational and sensorial, amplifies its significance toward consumers and inflects its commercial and emotional charm through new dimensions in the store. The next three papers empirically investigate the role of corporate branding in retailing. Ammar Sammour, Weifeng Chen, and John Balmer studied corporate heritage brand traits and corporate heritage brand identity by concentrating on developing key dimensions for corporate heritage brand dimensions in the retailing industry in the UK. Dilini Edirisinghe, Alireza Nazarian, Pantea Foroudi, and Andrew Lindridge investigate how young female customers establish psychological relationships with small- to medium-scale retail stores over time forming purchase intentions, actual purchase patterns and repurchase behaviour. The next paper aims to explore the extent to which luxury brand retailers employ new technologies as a tool for corporate marketing communication. Rosanna Passavanti, Eleonora Pantano, Constantinos Vasilios Priporas, and Saverino Verteramo's findings reveal that whilst this sector is aware of the benefits of using new media as a marketing communication tool, the effective use of these new media is still limited. The last paper in our ebook undertakes qualitative research within different industrial contexts. The study aims to address the following: How do practitioners in non-service organisations interpret internal market orientation (IMO); how is IMO practiced within an eastern cultural context; and what are the outcomes of its implementation? Qionglei Yu, Bradley Barnes, and Yu Ye reveal that: a) senior management commitment should be included in the design of IMO at the strategic level; b) effective responsiveness to internal information collected is crucial to its success; c) creative ways to meet internal customers' needs and expectations are contextualised; and d) cultural nuances need to be considered when applying IMO. In conclusion, this ebook develops a coherent and consistent contribution to research into corporate brand communication and social media with empirical studies across a wide range of settings.