“You Are All Loved so Much”

Abstract

This research explores relational maintenance within the context of parasocial relationships. The New Kids on the Block (NKOTB), one of the most popular musical groups in the late 1980s and early 1990s, abruptly disbanded in 1994. In 2008, after a 14-year hiatus, the band announced their reformation. Members of NKOTB blogged about their reunion on the group’s website ( www.nkotb.com ), and a thematic analysis was conducted, using both deductive and inductive procedures, of 2,122 postings by audience members to these blog entries. Analysis revealed that audience members utilized, in various ways, both positivity and assurance maintenance strategies ( Canary, Stafford, Hause, & Wallace, 1993 ). The results suggest that audience members enacted relational maintenance to express support for NKOTB and to demonstrate that they had remained committed to their parasocial relationship with NKOTB, despite the group’s absence. These actions positively reinforced NKOTB’s decision to reunite and conveyed fans’ desire for NKOTB’s return to be permanent. Thus, similar to actual social relationships, relational maintenance also functions within parasocial relationships and merits further research attention.

‘You really are a great big sister’ – parasocial relationships, credibility, and the moderating role of audience comments in influencer marketing

“…Therefore, negative relational behaviours, such as criticism, should also be taken into account when examining PSRs (Sanderson, 2009). Both PSI and PSRs can be very powerful and can affect an audience member's identity, lifestyle, attitude, and behaviour (Tian & Hoffner, 2010).…”

“…With regard to influencers, the results imply that in order to be effective endorsers, they need to have the courage to open up their lives and build trusting relationships with their followers. This may be risky, because PSRs are not always positive in nature (Tian & Hoffner, 2010) and may expose influencers to negative relational behaviours, such as criticism (Sanderson, 2009) or even trolling. Continuous self-presentation on social media is a stressful job and interaction with followers takes a lot of time.…”

Exploring lack of closure as a brand transgression

“…However, narratives that are perceived to still have unanswered questions and possibilities can trigger anger (Russell and Schau, 2014) and protests (Jenkins, 2012), such as those directed at the television shows Beauty and the Beast and All My Children. This is because audiences can feel strong emotional attachment to narrative brands, their characters, narratives and worlds and even their consumption experiences (Sanderson, 2009;Siegert et al, 2015), for example some audiences' members may regularly meet with a group of friends to watch a television series (Russell and Schau, 2014).…”

“…This research adopted a qualitative approach using thematic analysis following Braun and Clarke's (2006) methods. A qualitative approach is particularly useful for investigating online spaces (Kozinets, 2002), because it can capture the richness of the audiences' reactions to a narrative brand (Sanderson, 2009). Thematic analysis was used to analyse the comments because of its flexibility and ability to be applied across a range of theoretical approaches (Braun and Clarke, 2006) to understand how people think and feel (Guest et al, 2012).…”

Role of Influencers in Digital Marketing: The moderating impact of follower’s interaction

“…A para-social relationship means a one-sided relationship that social media users virtually develop with the social media influencers or with the digital celebrities (Giles, 2002;Hartmann et al, 2008;Sanderson, 2009).…”