Under the background of Internet community and the community economy, as the users’ spending pattern changes, brand marketing and communication ways of enterprises have also changed: marketing from offline to online, communication focus from interpreting product functions to building up brand concept and personality, promotion strategy from wide online platform-based communication to Internet community culture-based communication. Therefore, both at the academic level and the practical level, it is of great reference value to start with "Internet community culture" to do research on brand communication and reflect on and rebuild the core concept and strategy of brand marketing and promotion.
In the era of Web3.0,"cultural identity" has become the conceptual foundation for building a brand."Cultural identity" means the interaction and coordination at the level of values and behavioral significance. So a brand is no longer the exclusive logo of a product, but the presentation of a group in the sociological sense, that is, a symbol of a social class. Spending is no longer a process of desire-based exchanges, but a social value practice process with group identity. Therefore, identifying with consumers and obtaining group identification of target users at the cultural level have become the key to brand recognition. Amid the new situation of Internet-based branding, communication and brand influence in the digital era, a new concept of “brand openness” has been raised and gradually accepted in the fields of advertising, brand marketing and corporate management. This concept lays emphasis on the open and inclusive strategy for users’ diversified demands, focuses on users’ dominant role in branding and communication and particularly mentions cultural elements of a brand should be built based on users’ identification and acceptance. Hongxing Erke was highly praised by virtue of its performance in the Xinjiang Long-Staple Cotton incident in March 2021 and the Henan flood in July 2021.A series of marketing moves of the enterprise has shaped the emotion of patriotism that matches with the patriotic culture of netizens. The two events eventually pushed the brand to the top and triggered netizens’ irrational consumption.
The premise and foundation for a brand’s survival and development is meeting needs of the specific user base, i.e."community communication" shall be the core strategy of brand promotion. Online communities composed of different user groups, with the help of their separate unique community culture, continuously enhance the emotional adhesion and behavioral consistency among members. Brands can efficiently complete community communication and achieve group identity through community culture, make people living in the consumer society demonstrate their cultural and class characteristics by means of brand (symbol) consumption, and meet their emotional needs for group belonging and group identity.
As a unique form of subculture, Internet community culture is increasingly becoming one of the important factors affecting people's brand consumption in the online society. In the face of brand marketing changes in the Internet era, we should not only give analysis on factors affecting branding and brand consumption from the “people” perspective, but also attach great importance to the impact of cultural factors on the ecology of brand market, explore new areas and tendencies for brand value building, information interaction and Internet marketing from the theoretical perspective of “consumer society” and "semiotics", so as to facilitate the expansion of Internet community-based brand culture and the upgrade of consumption.
Issued on January 20, 2022
Wang Zhan (Professor), Sun Wenrui (doctoral candidate)
School of Journalism and Communication, Hunan Normal University