The effects of value co-creation practices on building harmonious brand community and achieving brand loyalty on social media in China
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.
Section snippets
Literature review
Brand community is essentially “a group of consumers with a shared enthusiasm for a certain brand and a well-developed social identity, with members who engage jointly in the group action to achieve the collective goals and/or express mutual feelings and commitment” (Bagozzi & Dholakia, 2006). In brand communities, consumers are usually self-motivated and enthusiastic in exchanging, sharing and debating ideas, and contribute to the improvement of products and services, which play an important
Effects of value co-creation practices on consumer-brand and consumer-other consumers’ relationships
The process of collective value creation in brand community is mainly driven by a set of practices: social networking, community engagement, impression management and brand use. These practices include a variety of specific activities, such as welcoming, empathizing, milestoning, documenting, evangelizing, justifying, customizing, commoditizing and so on (Schau et al., 2009). Through these practices in brand communities, members obtain the continuous interaction and in-depth understanding of
Subjects and procedure
Responses were collected through a web-based questionnaire survey so we made sure that everyone was exposed and responded to all questions. Also the survey enabled us to measure the time everyone spent on each question, and did not allow participants to fill out the questionnaire more than once. Potential respondents were recruited from an online community of Chinese mobile phone brands based on Sina Weibo. The research platform has around 0.31 million members, with sufficient amount of
Results
First, we conducted a confirmatory factor analysis to access the measurement properties of the reflective latent constructs. Second, we performed structural equation modeling analysis to test the research hypotheses with LISREL 8.70.
Discussion and implications
This study looked at the significant effect of brand communities established on social media. Drawing on the literature on brand community based on social media, we proposed a model of the effects of value co-creation practices on building harmonious brand community (establishing and keeping good consumer-brand and consumer-other consumers’ relationships) on digital social media and the way they convert to brand loyalty through community commitment. Using SEM we found support for the model and
Limitations and future research
Despite these contributions, we acknowledge the limitations of this research and accordingly propose new avenues for future research. First, because of the massive numbers of brand communities on social media, our study may not be representative of all communities developed on the social network. The brand community we selected was built on Sina Microblog that is a very popular social networking platform, which makes the brand community could be very different from other platforms. It would be
Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 71272018), and the useful suggestions by the editor and reviewers.
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