Netnography as a tool for understanding customers: implications for service research and practice

Kristina Heinonen · Gustav Medberg

227 citations0/0 files storedJournal of Services Marketing

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Digital Marketing and Social Media Customer Service Quality and Loyalty Focus Groups and Qualitative Methods

Abstract

Purpose Understanding customers is critical for service researchers and practitioners. Today, customers are increasingly active online, and valuable information about their opinions, experiences and behaviors can be retrieved from a variety of online platforms. Online customer information creates new opportunities to design personalized and high-quality service. This paper aims to review how netnography as a method can help service researchers and practitioners to better use such data. Design/methodology/approach A systematic review and analysis were conducted on 321 netnography studies published in marketing journals between 1997 and 2017. Findings The systematic review reveals that netnography has been applied in a variety of ways across different marketing fields and topics. Based on the analysis of existing netnography literature, empirical, theoretical and methodological recommendations for future netnographic service research are presented. Research limitations/implications This paper shows how netnography can offer service researchers unprecedented opportunities to access naturalistic online data about customers and, hence, why it is an important method for future service research. Practical implications Netnographic research can help service firms with, for example, service innovation, advertising and environmental scanning. This paper provides guidelines for service managers who want to use netnography as a market research tool. Originality/value Netnography has seen limited use in service research despite many promising applications in this field. This paper is the first to encourage and support service researchers in their use of the method and aims to stimulate interesting future netnographic service research.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 227 citations exist upstream.

References

1994Qualitative Data Analysis: An Expanded Sourcebook 1988Structural equation modeling in practice: A review and recommended two-step approach.1985A Conceptual Model of Service Quality and Its Implications for Future Research 1988SERVQUAL: A multiple-Item Scale for measuring consumer perceptions of service quality 1992Basics of Qualitative Research 2002Qualitative research & evaluation methods 2003Towards a Methodology for Developing Evidence‐Informed Management Knowledge by Means of Systematic Review 2003Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing

Cited by

2020Exploring the use of content analysis methodology in consumer research 2023Consumer response journey following a product‐harm crisis: The role of online brand communities 2022Insights into the Lived Experience of Misfits at Work: A Netnographic Study 2023Consumer Perception of Robotic Mobile Fulfillment Systems 2023Innovative value propositions in the fashion metaverse

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.