The effects of value co-creation practices on building harmonious brand community and achieving brand loyalty on social media in China

Highlights

• Value co-creation practices influence consumer-brand-consumer triad relationships.

• Harmonious brand communities enhance community commitment and brand loyalty.

• Community commitment has positive effects on brand loyalty.

Abstract

Social media activities generated by consumers in brand communities are claimed to have a potentially game-changing impact on interaction among brand entities and brand building. In this article, we explore whether value co-creation practices in brand community have positive effects on the consumer-brand and consumer-other consumers’ relationships, as well as, community commitment and brand loyalty. A survey based empirical study with 286 respondents was conducted. The results of structural equation modeling show that four value co-creation practices positively influence consumer-other consumers’ relationships and only two of the four positively influence consumer-brand relationships. The consumer-brand-consumer triad relationships could significantly enhance brand loyalty directly, as well as indirectly through community commitment. Finally, theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.

Introduction

For researchers and marketers, through the relationship marketing or building consumer relationships, to improve consumer loyalty has been an important issue (Berry, 1995, Payne and Frow, 2005). A brand community is “a specialized, non-geographically bound community, based on a structured set of social relationships among admirers of a brand” (Muniz & O’Guinn, 2001), which provides a new, important and effective means for establishing the deep and long term bonds between consumers and brands (Thompson & Sinha, 2008). In brand communities these consumer-centric, relational and co-creative practices are increasingly paraded as backbone of good ties between consumers and the elements of community (McAlexander, Schouten, & Koenig, 2002). Marketing scholars invest considerable effort to understand the various practices’ roles in the nurture process of harmonious relationships within brand community (Muniz and O’guinn, 2001, Nuttavuthisit, 2010, Schouten et al., 2007).

The rapidly growing popularity of social networking technologies has provided brand community with a new platform and opportunity to retain existing customer and attract new one (Kietzmann, Hermkens, McCarthy, & Silvestre, 2011). Due to the characteristics of brand community based on social media, such as no time constraint, non-geographically bound, high information transparency, and multi-party communication, it has become an important platform for placing a variety of value co-creation practices, where consumers can easily share consumption experiences and interact with each other (Muniz & Schau, 2005), and brand managers can “listen to” and interact with their consumers (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010). Schau, Muñiz, and Arnould (2009) systematically organized four thematic categories: social networking, community engagement, impression management, and brand use to represent a constellation of practices coalesce to create value-added brand community experiences, such as sharing information, perpetuating the history and culture of the brand, and providing assistance. Although many researches point out that these common practices had an important influence on fostering loyal consumers (Leigh et al., 2006, McAlexander et al., 2002, Muniz and O’guinn, 2001, Muniz and Schau, 2005), there are few literatures interpret the specific role process from the empirical perspective.

In response, taking the perspective of building solid relationships in brand community, this paper pursues an empirical investigation to show how value co-creation practices influence the consumer-brand-consumer triad relationships in brand community, and brand loyalty. Furthermore, we study how the effects of brand community translate to brand loyalty. In doing so, we believe that community commitment has a key role, which has been neglected in previous studies.

The remainder of this article is organized as follows. We begin with a brief review of the theoretical background of important concepts such as brand community and value co-creation practices. Then we develop our hypotheses which relate to our conceptual model of how value co-creation practices can influence the construction of harmonious brand community, community commitment, and brand loyalty. Finally, we report the results of our study. We conclude with a discussion of our findings, limitations of our research and avenues for future research.