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UM E-Theses Collection (澳門大學電子學位論文庫)

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Title

Building brand-consumer relationships on WeChat : the case of IKEA

English Abstract

Over the past 20 years, a large number of studies on dialogic communication and relationship building between organizations and their publics have found public relations practice on the Internet fallen short of what is expected of it. Since the advent of Facebook and Twitter, Social Networking Sites (SNS) seem to again have captured PR practitioners’ imagination. Applying dialogic principles as a guiding theoretical framework, this study examines how a lifestyle brand – in this case, IKEA – builds brand-customer relationships on its WeChat official account, the latest popular SNS app developed in China. A content analysis of 118 columns of posts in IKEA’s official WeChat account was conducted while in-depth interviews with subscribers/followers to IKEA’s official WeChat account were carried out to glean real-life user experiences. The findings reveal that although the technological capacity of WeChat provides a congenital advantage for lifestyle brands to engage online subscribers/followers in more dialogic and symmetrical fashion, IKEA fails to exploit such technological potentials to the fullest, especially during the early months right after it created an official WeChat account.

Issue date

2015.

Author

Huang, Jia Wen

Faculty

Faculty of Social Sciences

Department

Department of Communication

Degree

M.A.

Subject

Internet marketing -- Case studies

Online social networks -- Case studies

Customer relations -- Case studies

Supervisor

Li, Ying

Files In This Item

Full-text (Intranet only)

Location
1/F Zone C
Library URL
991008691189706306