社区体验能提升消费者的品牌忠诚吗--不同体验成分的作用与影响机制研究

Can Community Experience Lead to Brand Loyalty? A Study of the Effect and Mechanism of Different Experience Dimensions

随着社会化媒体的发展,越来越多的企业已经开始主动构建虚拟品牌社区。企业构建虚拟品牌社区的重要目标是通过为消费者活动搭建平台,加强品牌与消费者之间的联系、创造品牌忠诚,但是现有研究对于消费者参与虚拟品牌社区活动如何影响品牌忠诚却缺乏明确的结论。针对这一问题,本文基于消费者体验视角,研究了消费者参与社区活动所产生的不同社区体验成分,即信息体验、娱乐体验和互动体验对品牌忠诚的影响作用及机制。研究结果表明,不同体验成分对于品牌忠诚的影响作用及机制存在较大差异。具体而言,信息体验能正向影响品牌忠诚,其中社区认同起着部分中介传导作用;娱乐体验也能促进品牌忠诚,但其作用完全受到社区认同中介传导作用;互动体验对品牌忠诚并不存在显著的直接影响。针对虚拟社区中细分人群的进一步分析发现,不同性别成员及不同社区参与时间长度的成员在上述机制中存在明显差异。本文的结论对于企业管理虚拟品牌社区、创造品牌忠诚具有重要的指导意义。

With the development of social media, more and more en- terprises have begun to take the initiative to build virtual brand com- munities. The important goal for enterprises to build virtual brand community is to strengthen the contact between the brand and the consumer and to create brand loyalty, but the question that how enter- prise＇s participating virtual brand community influence brand loyalty still lacks of clear understanding until now. Therefore, this article intends to explore whether all activities of virtual brand community participation of community members pose the same effect on brand loyalty or not, and what is the mechanism. From the perspective of consumer experience, this article examines how different community experience dimensions namely： information experience, entertain- ment experience and interactive experience influence brand loyalty differently. Furthermore, drawing on the social identity theory, we propose that community identification may act as a significant me- diated factor between community experience and brand loyalty. And finally, to provide more managerial relevance, we also explore that how some demographic characteristics will influence the mechanism. In order to testify our model, we recruit survey subjects online via a virtual brand community of a famous cell-phone company in China. In the process, 281 valid samples are obtained to test our hypotheses. Based on the survey data, we firstly check the reliability and validity of measurement and then employ the regression model to examine the proposed model. The results show that, there are significant dif- ferences among the effect of the three dimensions on brand loyalty. Specifically, information experience can promote the brand loyalty, in which community identification plays the part of the intermediary role; secondly, entertainment experience can also promote the brand loyalty, whose effect are fully mediated by the effect of community identification; thirdly, interactive experience does not enhance brand loyalty directly. According to the analysis of different populations in the virtual community, this paper also finds that different gender and participation time among members, there is a marked difference in the mechanism above. The conclusion of this paper can apply into managing virtual brand community and creating brand loyalty.