Explaining Brand Preference in Online Community: A Study of Kaskus, The Largest Indonesian Community

Abstract

Information technology usage has been a major focus of information systems research for more than two decades. This is because information technology usage has been demonstrated to be a key driver of organizational performance. Information technology development is a great opportunity for companies to creatively innovate their product in order to develop their business. The development of internet makes many other new things develop too, for example online shopping. The rapid and global change of communication technology gave a bigger chance and efficiency to the marketers. As the rapid development of internet since its appearance, another sites has been showed up, and not only online shopping sites, online blogs, but also community sites that not only use as the site to make a friend, but also offer sell and buy forum that provide needs.

Therefore, this study aims to analyze the effects of brand offering to brand familiarity and brand evaluation and the effect of brand familiarity and brand evaluation to brand preference. The results of this study can be used by Kaskus to develop the best strategy in order to increase the number of users of Kaskus. This study uses quantitative approach with Multiple Regression technique and SPSS 16.0 program. Questionnaires were distributed to 100 respondents who used as a sample in this study using non probability sampling and snowball sampling’s method.

The result of this study shows that brand offering has positive and significant effects on brand familiarity and brand evaluation. In addition, this study also found that brand familiarity and brand evaluation has positive and significant effect on brand preference in Surabaya.

Keywords: Brand evaluation, brand familiarity, brand offering, brand preference, online community