Thiemo BrandtDie Mitgliedschaftsstrategie

About this book deutschenglish

In today's time memberships are an integral part of daily life. Membership relationships between organizations and consumers are found in various areas of everyday life. No matter whether it's the gym membership or the membership in the iTunes multimedia portal, in practice membership is ingrained in the ideas and expectations of consumers.

The aim of the present work was the progression of the theoretical framework of the membership strategy and the modeling of the Consumer-Centric Membership Strategy to answer the question of whether using membership strategies, such as the Consumer-Centric Membership Strategy, are able to generate competitive advantage through the management of the institutional context.

The center point of the study, in addition to the modeling of the Consumer-Centric Membership Strategy, is the empirical case study investigation of the organizations Blizzard Entertainment, Apple and PayPal. Blizzard Entertainment’s gaming service Battle.net lists 12 million active members, Apple's iTunes multimedia portal 200 million, and PayPal's online payment system 230 million worldwide. The case study analysis aims to epirically investigate the theoretical concept of the Consumer-Centric Membership Strategy. Therefore, a specially created online survey was designed and conducted, and over a period of two months, surveyed more than 600 members.

The results of the study show that a successfully implemented Consumer-Centric Membership Strategy may be able to protect the organization against the dominant institutional pressure of the organisational field and that an effectively implemented membership network can, in certain circumstances, be institutionalized within the organizational field. This establishment of a new institution, and the resulting pressure on the competitors can lead to a temporary competitive advantage for the organization.

The findings in this study provide a useful contribution to the theory of membership strategy in strategic management. The developed concept of the Consumer-Centric Membership Strategy contributes in connection with the theory of institutionalism for the explanation of competitive advantage in strategic management. The results of this work are able to explain the generation of competitive advantages by implementing a Consumer-Centric Membership Strategy.

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