People constantly communicate with each other; they talk and share information about everything. The Internet provides numerous ways for consumers to share their views, preferences, or experiences with others and also has changed the way customers and firms interact. Whether firms like it or not, customers talk about them in social platforms, blogs, forums so firms have to carefully evaluate if, how, and when to participate, so that they can take advantage of word-of-mouth marketing. Through their growth in online participation, customers generate word-of-mouth marketing that exerts a great influence over the brands, firms and also over customer's attitude toward those brands. Integrating word of mouth into marketing strategy may be beneficial and would be consistent with the development of a customer focused approach to a market. The aim of the paper is to present an overview and assessment of challenges and opportunities for companies, emerging from the greater diversity and complexity of word-of-mouth marketing in a new communication era. This paper adopts a theoretical approach and brings a summary of empirical findings that reveal the evolution of word-of-mouth marketing, how firms can generate positive word-of-mouth marketing in social networks, and what is its impact in customer's brand attitude.

Brands offer advantages for consumers and companies and companies are spending a lot in creating and managing their brands. Brand equity and its dimensions have received a great attention from academics. The purpose of this paper is to test the proposed model to better understand brand equity among Albanian consumers. It investigates the hierarchy of brand equity dimensions and the effect these dimensions have on brand equity. Hypothesis were tested using structural equation modeling. The reliability of the model was assessed using confirmatory factor analysis. Results show that brand awareness has a positive effect on brand associations, brand associations positively affect perceived quality which is positively related to brand loyalty. All dimensions have a positive effect on brand equity. Items for measuring overall brand equity were used. This study contributes to the large body of literature on brand equity. It has limitations because we use two product categories and a limited set of brands.