在线品牌社区免费试用贡献的影响因素研究

Research on the Influencing Factors of Free Trial Contribution in Online Brand Community

近年来,各大品牌社区纷纷推出了免费试用活动,以期通过免费试用获取新产品的初期口碑。现有关于免费试用的文献多研究免费试用的促销作用,其研究情境多为第三方平台,较少涉及品牌社区中的试用贡献行为。本研究以海尔社区为研究对象,收集了66期试用活动323位试用者的试用报告和个人主页数据,通过最小二乘法和负二项回归分析,检验了社会临场感、社会学习、积分等级和感知稀缺性对试用贡献数量及质量的影响。除此之外,本研究根据试用者前期申请记录将试用者划分为高参与度和低参与度两种类型,发现了不同参与度的试用者在试用贡献质量上的差异。通过子样本回归,进一步分析了造成试用贡献质量差异的原因。本研究丰富了免费试用的研究视角,为企业有效地识别优质试用者提供了实践帮助。

In recent years,many online brand communities have launched free trial activities in order to obtain the initial word-of-mouth of new products.Previous researches mostly focus on the promotional effect of free trial under the background of third-party platform.The research on free trial contribution behavior in online brand communities is still very limited.This study collects 323 trial reports and personal home page information of the adopters during 66 free trial activities,examines the impact of social presence,social learning,user level and perceived scarcity on trial contribution quantity and quality through OLS and negative binomial regression analysis.In addition,this study divides the adopters into two types:high participation and low participation according to the preliminary application records and reveals a significant difference between different participants in free trial contribution quality.The reasons for the difference in the quality of trial contribution are analyzed through grouped regression.This study enriches the research perspective of free trial,which also provides practical help for enterprises to identify high quality adopters.