Netnography as a marketing research tool in the fashion industry in Southeast Europe

In the past decades, marketing has been revolutionized by digital sources, which provide marketers with rich information on potential consumers. Consequently, this article explores the evolving opportunities that online communities present to marketers in collecting consumer insights. It advances Southeast Europe's marketing researchers' understanding of netnography by introducing them to its concept, procedures, and implications. This study triangulates the data through utilizing seven one-to-one in-depth interviews with fashion designers, employing two focus groups with fashion consumers who actively congregate in online communities, and through conducting netnography on a fashion-related online community. This article demonstrates netnography practices, and experiences with the goal of having fashion designers and marketers understand its potential as an efficient method for providing effective qualitative market intelligence. It shows that netnography is a relatively easy, cost-effective and time-efficient approach, and it supports brand development through achieving a better understanding of consumer perceptions. Overall, netnography has great potential as a marketing research tool. Online fashion community members' views support it as most of them prefer to participate in netnographic research. Nevertheless, the majority of fashion designers in Southeast Europe are not fully aware of the method and its exact procedures and, hence, avoid using it.