Investigating the interaction of factors affecting the formation and development of brand communities using Fuzzy DEMATEL

The purpose of this research is to investigate the factors affecting the formation and development of brand communities in the digital marketing space of the Instagram social media.

The present study is developmental and applied in terms of its purpose. It has a hybrid approach in terms of its nature. It is survey research in terms of implementation. It is descriptive based on data collection. This research, in the first phase, literature review and interviews have been used to identify the effective factors for the formation and development of brand communities, in the second phase, factors have been screened by fuzzy Delphi method, and in the last phase, the fuzzy Demetal method has been used to identify the effective and influencing factors.

In the present study, 68 influential factors have been identifing in the first phase of the research. In the second phase of the research, after screened the factors in two phased Delphi repetitions, 16 effective factors on the formation and development of brand communities to introduced and in the third phase, the have been determining intensit of the influencing factors.

The results show that product prestige, overall satisfaction, product development, customer age, product quality, celebrity reputation, and celebrity moral characteristics were identifed as causes. Common awareness, word-of-mouth marketing, customs, brand symbolic function, brand identification, human-to-human interaction through the net platform, social responsibility, customer's emotional experience, and foreign brand reputation were recognized as Effective. also they have ranked based influence of the factors.