Experience communication, virtual community and value creation in on line business
Vittoria Marino – Associated professor in International Marketing - University of Salerno - Italy
Giada Mainolfi - Contract researcher in Business Administration - University of Salerno - Italy
Debora Tortora - Phd in Communication Sciences - University of Salerno - Italy
Paola Zoccoli - Phd in Public Management - University of Salerno – Italy
Experience communication, virtual community and value creation in on line business
1.Foreword; 2.Marketing and communication in the experience economy; 3. Experience space in on line business: the community role; 4. Virtual community contribution to the value creation of the firm; 5.Conclusions; Select Bibliography
Abstract
Accelerating the replacement of satisfactory objects and the emergent socializing vs cocurrent subjectiveness of consumption lead to qualify and valorize the space of existence and the “area of living” through situations in which the customer can experience affective and emotional states associated with consumption. In this context firms have been engaged in the correct creation and communication of real situations. The first section of the paper provides background information on the development of marketing studies up to "experience economy”. Then opportunities for on line business are discussed offered by means of a virtual community, creating a value system for the consumer from which a sustainable advantage for the firm is derived.
1. Foreword
The acceleration in replacing objects, the transitory pleasure of possessing, but also an exquisitely democratic dimension of the self social expression - thanks to a more autonomous and personal access to lifestyles that are no longer expression of class belonging, but refer to individualized dimensions - lead today to a different meaning of the concept of “consumption”. The action of consumption, no more only a sphere of activities like other functions carried out by the individual, is qualified as “a cultural sphere, capable to produce its own view of the world, a system of values and a structure of peculiar personalities” (Siri G.,2001), expressing a new “area of living”, appealing to principles of plurality and social mutability. If the whole existence of modern man is characterized by “search”, his aware and voluntary participation into manifold projects sets itself as a necessary preliminary basis for the “social construction of one’s identity” (Di Nallo E., 1998).
Sharing this process, the customer is necessarily recognized as a scant, and, consequently, precious and yearned for resource, becoming the focus of a new policy of appreciation of the individual, in the pursuit of the individual expectations that outline a “unique person”. Therefore, the firm needs to be cast into a new dimension, basically a project one, in which its own market interlocutors appear to be, above all, “people and their dreams”. In fact, if a firm is viable when proposing new renewed values, in order to achieve consonance with its demand (consumers’ requirements), the customer himself and his consumption ritual become the ultimate element of the firm changing process. A reconsideration, in an interactive key, of the relations with the customer system becomes thus necessary; in fact a satisfied customer (though with all his different ways of expressions) is the necessary starting point to have a loyal customer, representing the real patrimony, perhaps the most precious one, on which every business sets its opportunities of development and bases its actual survival. Consequently, if for a long time the success of online marketing has expressed itself through the profitable combination of the ideas of convenience and practicality of the economic relation in order to stop the customer and tie him to the firm web site, on the contrary, the contemporary trend goes toward an organization capable to communicate with the customer through emotions, involving him in the purchase, making him feel a protagonist in his choice and satisfied with it. On the other hand emotion contributes to solve the issue of how to arrange knowledge and actions, within a context that the navigator (as well as the firm) can never totally know and in which he is meant to act with limited resources. The future of marketing, especially of web marketing, starts from these background evaluations.
2. Marketing and communication in the experience economy
If we analyze the physiological evolution of online markets, we can observe a progressive saturation of the demand for products and services. At the same time we can notice another typology of demand, in which the primary needs of the cyberconsumer are replaced by others connected to time - as a fruition moment to be valorised as a scant resource - and to the emotional sphere - characterizing itself as a search for sense and identity in the supply and in the navigation action itself. Consumption, as “narrative development”, capable to express new meanings in the interaction between the supply and the way it is perceived by the consumer, leads necessarily to such an analysis. On the other hand, “consumption innovation” refers to a search for novelty as a virtual use of consumption situations or different contexts, outlining how the motivations underlying certain navigation and, consequently, purchasing processes, involve considerably different clusters of customers, according to the consumer perspective, such as efficiency, game dimension, excellence, aesthetics, status, ethics, esteem, spirituality.
The concept of experience consumption, as a particular condition of on and off line marketing research, is emerging just in this field, even if with alternate tension in time.
Understanding the phenomenon referring to the experience dimension, however, has a sense under a previous analysis of the interpretations of the idea of experience brought about in different scientific fields: as activity (or passivity, meant as absence of action) producing a modification, in terms of growth of knowledge, in the subject involved (Carù A., Cova B., 2003). Therefore, if the conceptual matrix, outlined by experimental science, qualifies the notion of experience as a function of the reproducibility of the observed phenomena, these being based on objective and generalizable data (1), on the contrary, philosophical studies safeguard the individual/personal dimension, producing not universal knowledge but knowledge belonging to a single actor. Similarly, the sociological and psychological approaches to this issue emphasize the individual cognitive dimension of experiential activity through which human beings build up their own identity. All this leads to the interpretation, supported here, of the category of experience as personal real life, though caused by external stimuli, controllable by the firm and often loaded with emotions. Thus views of sure interest in the tradition of management and business studies get started.
On the other hand, without going over all the studies on consumer behaviour again, already in the early Eighties the issue of the consumer as a not perfectly rational entity, unlike the way economic sciences had pointed out, had emerged attracting the attention of these kinds of analysis. The so-called utilitarian studies have as its object of study the consumer decisional problem in front of getting supplies and, consequently, of picking up different goods. They solve the question proposing a perfectly rational customer choosing the offer that provides the highest utility – or likely to do so – on the basis of its characteristics. The hedonistic thought, instead, following the view of the "consumer as an experiential being that buys for fun (Vescovi T., Checchinato F., 2003), recovers the role of emotions as meaningful consumption experiences, not only connected to hedonic assets (Addis M., 2002), as at the beginning, but also linked to daily consumption supplies (figure 1).
Inizio modulo
From this moment on, consumption starts to be conceived as a holistic experience, both by the customer - that judges the performance on the basis of the involvement and the general value he receives, not only in terms of price/quality relation of the supply (2) - and by the firm, required to plan events, situations, real life contexts and not simply products. In fact “consumption is an experience coming out of the interaction between a subject – the consumer – and an object – a product, an event, an idea, a person, a place, or any other thing within a given context” (Addis M., 2002).
In such a perspective experience becomes a new form of purchasing, like a suspension between need and desire (Bucchetti V., 2004).
In Rifkin’s words: “in the age of material capitalism and property the emphasis was on assets and services sale; in the cyberspace economy, the transformation of assets and services into goods becomes secondary compared to the reification of human relations. In a more and more frenetic and changeable network economy to keep customer attention high means to succeed to control most of their time. Moving from moderate market transactions, limited in time and space, to relations/goods unlimited in time, the new economic sphere is able to subdue a wider part of daily life to profit” (Rifkin J., 2000).This is the real essence of the modern supply system, in which the customer oriented perspective ends up to prevail on the production system itself, developing in terms of “access to the customer” and willing to establish lasting relations (not only commercial) with him (3). At this point the challenge, especially when referred to electronic interactions, is set more and more as a matter of relations (and control) of the consumers community. The aim of the firm, both as a click and mortar and as a click and click kind - from production to sale, to the management of long term relations – becomes more and more to create value (not only economic one) for the customer, grouped within individualized micro personal clusters, almost as if every single individual is considered as a unique and special fragment of a society searching for unusual socializing and aggregating patterns. Just these relations and formulas of aggregation seem to represent the present emerging, critic requirement of the consumption system, whose defence, then, ensures the competitive advantage aimed at. Thus the firms that succeed in this aim reap the fruits of their capacity to appeal to a common and reciprocal feeling of understanding, apt to put back together these fragments into “tribal” unities, urban sub groups, expressing life rules (emotional) to which the product/service already belongs.
This is the essence of tribal marketing (Lasalle D., Britton T. A., 2003) that can put together rituals and phenomena of emotional “polysensorial” collective consumption, thus determining the connection values of the fragment/ subgroup. “[the firm] will communicate to fragment/ subgroups, to neo tribes, through devoted media thanks to a new sociological structure of its intelligence database […] This will happen without ever pushing the purchase or for a utilitarian purpose aimed at selling, thus showing real empathy and tribal sympathy. In the future the brand will share collective backgrounds, hobbies and tendencies as an involved observer, sharing the socio-antropological “affective ties” of the new-tribes, just making it known it was there as well. Within the tribe fragment an authentic totemic role will be played by opinion leaders. Testimonials, in other words ‹whitch doctors››, will be the aruspices of the bribal phenomenon, capable of starting the clapper board for a new scene: the passage from customers to costum-actors” (Alvisi M., 2004).
Values are recognized in four main components, originating a shared common sense: sense of belonging, as the awareness to be part of a neo-tribe, allows group members to experience a feeling of emotional, affective, physical, economic safety and of identification with the micro-group, with which to share an exclusive symbolic system; influence, reciprocal and bi-directional, of the individuals on the group and of the tribe on individuals; integration and the needs satisfaction coming from belonging to a specific community (4); finally, shared emotional connection, that is the availability of a common story, possibly shared between group members, that increases group cohesion through events, rituals, repeated and shared positive experiences. All that is highly claimed in virtualcommunities.
Emerging neo tribes, namely consumer communities, on the one hand and the opportunity of relation with them, using a shared value-symbolic register, on the other hand, allow to try out relational nets supporting transactions between firms and consumers. In other words, there is a new situation, with a high informative, emotional and sensory content, that allows the “tribal” consumer, or the cyber consumer, to enjoy real events and experiences, these becoming themselves an object of interest. The relation with the firm is built well beyond a mere mediation between the parts, being based, above all, on “generative communication”, whose aim is “to generate”, to produce and to spread sense, identity, sharing of purposes, through the activation of emotional alarms, capable to give meaning to such enunciative activity. Within marketing communication, incorporating emotions has a key function, leading the individual narrative process first, and the collective one on a second relational stage, towards perception of the experience.
In order to convey the ready-made experience correctly, if communicative processes strongly direct and influence the consumption system they sponsor (and they are set in), the system gives shape and substance to the communication processes themselves, that ensure visibility and expression. Such interdependence develops a spiral pattern showing the two dimensions in continuous progress with ever different and innovative forms.
In other words, consumption experience succeeds in becoming an appreciable economic proposal of value if the capability to do stands side by side with the capability to make it known (5), that is to make it visible outside (Siano A., 2001). In other words, consumption experience has its substance in the degree of communication it assumes to take shape. Experience, in fact, shows and feeds in itself a strong communicative need, that supports its vitality with the opportunity to be recognized by the customer and be endowed with value. All this states the need of communication of the experience.
On the side of communicative needs it is possible to observe, above all, an alteration of the space-temporal structure of the consumption routine. Together with this, the productive critical role of consumption so far described and the renewed centrality of the communicative agreement between consumption and its elaboration re-consider the theoretical and practical interpretative pattern used in firm communication up to now. Experience, therefore, individuates in the action itself (that is in its being carried out and reproduced) its own medium, the channel/ means to connect itself to the external world, thus creating its own space of influence, namely the consumer community using it.
The absolute necessity of communication, therefore, appears to be a decisive intangible factor for the survival and development of an experience producing firm, provided that the communication need is a faithful representation of the inspiring values of the system. The hypothesis supported here gives an interpretation of the concept of experience that doesn’t only limit its field of action to a dramatization of the event performed, intentionally made spectacular by the firm (Pine J. B. Gilmore J. H., 2000) – also following a cognitive model that is self-portrayed in the consumer/navigator’s mind, given certain expectations, whose form is clearly defined while being put into action - but is related to the context (portal, firm web site etc.) in which the event is lived and to what has been previously known from business interactions. With regard to this, we can justify the trend inversion according to which the orientation to the image (by the firm offering experience proposals), meant as mere appearance coming out of an advertising formula with limited action in time and effects - is replaced by orientation to transparency in firm business communication. So, firm communication is transparent when, conveying its own corporate identity, allows superior systems to perceive the underlying corporate personality. This aims at reaching a balance between corporate identity (as the whole of the visual elements of the system organization) and corporate image (the way communication is perceived by the external audience at a given time).
The codification of experience, seen as a commercial offer or, at least, as an integrant part of it, gets its features first of all from institutional (traditional) communication strategy. This carries out the conversion process from corporate identity into corporate image (Ferraro G., 1998) through a clear expression of the competence of the firm, what it is, its corporate personality (6).
What has been fundamentally noticed is that the customer no longer falls within a generic definition of public, passively assisting to a show performed by the firm. In fact the value of the experience is recognized to be just in the customer/ navigator’s involvement in the show. As a consequence, in order to be realized in its experiential form, the performance must be able to originate an interaction, if not physical, at least emotional, with its user. That is to be able to cause a modification in him. These are the bases the value model is essentially built on. In fact “We have all experienced times when, instead of being buffeted by anonymous forces, we do feel in control of our actions, masters of our own fate. On the rare occasions that it happens, we feel a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment that is long cherished and that becomes a landmark in memory for what life should be like. This is what we mean by optimal experience” (Csikszentmihalyi M., 1990). In the consumer perspective, therefore, customer experience as a rewarding human expression, is experienced when the psychic energy involved is carried on not only as high emotional involvement but also as control of the situation (Mathwick C., Rigdon E., 2004). In literature it is referred to as “flow experience”. Taking as reference points two dimensions, that is the grade of ability the situation requires, and the grade of challenge perceived by the user, namely the psychic energy involved, it is possible to go through alternative experiences, depending on whether the user perceives a limited energy to be applied in front of little involving (in which case a sense of bore and apathy will be felt) or more involving competitions (which will produce a feeling of worry, anxiety and excitement). The increasing capacity level will lead to a relaxing feeling first, and then a sense of control with increasing challenge level, up to the flow experience, in which both dimensions are active. Of course these kinds of experiences are not lived in the same way by all customers, the point of view being typically subjective and so individual.