Given its ever-increasing popularity, marketers are keen on exploring the benefits of using Twitter to create branded relationships with consumers. Central to the idea of consumer-brand relationships is the concept of commitment, which requires investment of direct resources, such as time, on the part of the consumer. The present research examines the relationship between time spent per login on Twitter and consumer-brand relationships through the constructs of brand relationship quality and brand attachment. Brand relationship quality is considered using four measures: enrichment, satisfaction, harmony, and trustworthiness. The concept of brand attachment is divided into measures of brand-self connection and brand prominence. Despite marketers’ efforts to keep consumers on Twitter for longer periods of time, results from this study were inconclusive, showing signs of little to no correlation between time and the tested variables. However, due to the limitations of this study, future research is necessary to improve the statistical quality of the findings. / text

Background: Today, for firms to engage with customers, it takes more than traditional advertisements, enticing prices and celebrity endorsements. Customers now rely on and expect to become an active rather than passive participant in the firm’s branding and marketing activities. Due to this change in the marketing environment firms have moved towards utilizing social media influencers and brand co-creation activities to drive the level to which customers connect their self-concepts with the brand.      Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to explore the unique ways in which NA-KD uses their influencer marketing strategy and brand co-creation activities to drive the social identities of their customers and to create a model that visualizes this process. Method: An exploratory study has been conducted by the authors to investigate the influencer marketing and brand co-creation activities of the firm as to address the purpose of this paper. A single case study was performed where NA-KD was the primary subject of research. Semi-structured interviews with key employees working within marketing, collaborations and content creation was the primary source of data collection.    Conclusion: The empirical findings demonstrated the processes which employees at NA-KD created to develop their influencer marketing and brand co-creation strategies. The findings showed that the social identities of customers in an influencer-born firm are able to be directed through the activities within influencer marketing and brand co-creation. From these findings a conceptual model representing the process and management of social identity direction and producer-consumer relationship formation. This process includes influencer marketing, brand co-creation and brand experience, managed by methods of CRM and circle mapping to allow for self-brand connections and continued firm growth to occur.