The Relationship between Firms' Virtual Brand Community Engagement Activities and Consumers' Community Commitment

Abstract

Abstract:

With the proliferation of social media, an increasingly number of firms begin proactively creating a virtual brand community and engage in it as an effort to strengthen the connection with consumers. However, there is a potential conflict between the business orientation of firms and the social interaction orientation of their brand communities, thus resulting in instability of consumers' engagement in communities. Previous researches mainly adopt a consumer perspective to investigate their engagement and its consequences whereas ignoring the effect of firms' participation. To fill this gap, this paper first identifies the most common community activities from firms, namely (i) content contribution, (ii) community regulation, (iii) activities organization, and then examines their effect on consumers' community commitment. The analysis indicates that "content contribution" and "activities organization" exert a positive impact on the formation of consumers' community commitment, but the effect of "community regulation" shows an inverted U-shape. Besides, it is also suggested that consumers with different engagement vintage respond to firms' activities variously. Our research has important implication for practical businesses.

Key words: virtual brand communities, content contribution, community regulation, activities organization, community commitment

Liao Junyun, Huang Minxue, Peng Jie. The Relationship between Firms' Virtual Brand Community Engagement Activities and Consumers' Community Commitment[J]. , 2017, 29(10): 73-83.

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