Company Tactics for Customer Socialization with Social Media Technologies: Finnair´s Rethink Quality and Quality Hunters Initiatives

Social media technologies (SMT) provide unparalleled opportunities for customer relationship management. But these technologies also create a new, unfamiliar, and complex context that can challenge the company´s efforts to guide and steer customer behavior to ensure achievement of desired objectives. We report on a case study that illustrates how a company in the airline industry experimented with SMTs to socialize customers to participate in the company´s quest for renewing its brand. The case points out gaps in our understanding of customer socialization when behaviors rely on SMT and customers have no or weak identification with the company. The company in question used boundary-spanning agents that facilitated a more experiential perspective to customer socialization. The experiential perspective complements the prevailing information processing perspective of customer socialization in the existing literature. The case holds implications for customer co-creation theories.