FINAL FANTASY XIV’S BRAND TRIBALISM AND HOW IT AFFECTS CUSTOMER COMMITMENT

• Main Author: Anugrah Pertiwi, Dian
• Format: Final Project
• Language: Indonesia
• Online Access: https://digilib.itb.ac.id/gdl/view/67748
• Institution: Institut Teknologi Bandung

Ever a strong choice for people’s preferred modes of entertainment, video games have continued to grow as a market—including Indonesia—and the pandemic has all but made its role more prominent in people’s daily lives, young and old, what with the constriction on much-needed social interactions forcing them to fulfill it through less physical ways so it does not add to the myriad of other distress it has brought about globally. One that fills such gaps under this condition is massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG), and a title from an already well-known and loved franchise that is Final Fantasy XIV is out and about making a bigger splash recently to the point that they had to stop sales from having too much player than they can handle at the moment. The previously mentioned reasons withstanding, it also stands to reason that one of the reasons for its massive growth in popularity is its fans, the players, who are apparently staunch advocates for the game itself. A product and/or service can always benefit from positive word-of-mouth, all the more when it is done voluntarily like this one. It then goes without saying that tapping more into how this phenomenon works will enable brands to gain such benefits, yet research on the subject remains sparse. Thus, this study aims to discuss how this phenomenon that may be referred to as brand tribalism will translate into benefits for the brand involved, in this case, a service that would always want for customer commitment to be able to survive and thrive. Here, the variables cognitive and affective involvement will be used to gauge the way Final Fantasy XIV players integrate into brand tribalism and how it affects their commitment to the game. A positivistic quantitative approach is used where the data is collected through online surveys as the instrument before it is analyzed using the multiple regression method. Customer commitment is to be the dependent variable with brand tribalism, cognitive involvement, and affective involvement being the independent variables. Brand tribalism will also be measured as a dependent variable beforehand in order to see how it facilitates the independent variables cognitive and affective involvement. The minimum amount of respondents needed for the data to be considered appropriate for further processing in the research is 90, and the survey has yielded 93 data from suitable respondents that fulfill the criteria, in which they must have to have played Final Fantasy XIV from at least 2021 and is playing in one of the Japanese data centers. After the analysis is conducted, it is then found that cognitive involvement on its own does not have significant influence on customer commitment and needs brand tribalism to first facilitate it to bring about indirect effect. In conclusion, brand tribalism can influence customer commitment directly on its own or by becoming the indirect liaison for customer involvement—even while affective involvement can affect customer commitment directly unlike its counterpart, going through brand tribalism first will still increase the impact. This study could aid Final Fantasy XIV and similar games in maintaining customer commitment by understanding how their communities interact with them as a brand tribe, giving them the knowledge that when increasing the inherent value of the service is not possible, they can turn and connect more to the community to be the value.