Research On Motivation,Influencing Factors And Its Mechanism Of Consumer Participation Behavior In Virtual Brand Community

Virtual brand community is bred by the increasingly strengthened brand marketing concept and highly developed Internet technology.With the typical features,such as diverse forms,timely interaction and open information dissemination,virtual brand community might meet consumers' various demands for value orientation,and has become an important platform for consumers to acquire information,obtain emotional attribution,build relationships,achieve self-value,and also plays a significant role for companies on attracting new customers,retaining old customers,developing brand and improving brand influence.Since the beginning of the 21st century,with the rapid development and widespread use of virtual brand community in marketing practice,relevant academic researches on that topic have been concerned by many scholars.However,the existing research production are mainly focused on the following two aspects:one is about the theoretical study or review of the formation and evolution of the virtual brand community,the other is about the affects of the virtual brand community,such as the effects on consumers' attitudes and behaviors,as well as the brand equity.However the studies about community members' behaviors,the behaviors' antecedents and formation mechanism in virtual brand community are relatively limited.To fully play the marketing meaning of virtual brand community for enterprises,the most importance is to stimulate consumers' initiatives to participate in the virtual brand community,such as searching information,sharing knowledge,collaborating and co-producing with enterprises and interacting with other members.Therefore,only if the intrinsic motives and factors influencing consumers' behaviors are mastered,the regularities of the consumers' psychology and behaviors can be deeply explored,and the corresponding incentives to push consumers' participation behavior can be found accurately.Thus the research on consumers' participation behavior,as well as the motivation,the influencing factors and the formation mechanism of that behavior in the virtual brand community,are both importantly significant in the theory and in the practice.Based on the motivation psychology theory and viewed from the relationship perspective,this paper highlights the social attributes of the virtual brand community,and studies on the individual's cognition to the social relation and their expected benefits from the social relation in the social groups,and then explores the formation mechanism of various participation behaviors of consumers in virtual brand communities.On the basis of the theoretical analysis,we construct a conceptual model for the mechanism of customer participation behavior in virtual brand community,in the light of the following sequence,influencing factors----motivation----customer behavior,and propose relative hypotheses about the inherent correlation between the following variables----individual characteristics,environmental characteristics,motivation and participation behavior.In the empirical study,we firstly conduct a small-scale questionnaire survey(n=127),to optimize and simplify the questionnaire.And then we choose the members of virtual brand community as the target to send out 748 questionnaires altogether,recycling 688 pieces and 561 valid ones are finally collected after screening and eliminating the unqualified questionnaires.The effective response rate is 75%.In the data processing,we divide the effective sample data into two groups:samples 1(n=280)and sample 2(n=281).With cross-validation,sample 1 is used for exploratory factor analysis,while sample 2 is used for confirmatory factor analysis,and the total sample(n=561)is used for empirically verifying the conceptual model with correlation analysis,regression analysis and structural equation modeling analysis.Through theoretical and empirical analysis,some important conclusions of this research are presented as follows:(1)The consumer participation behavior in virtual brand community consists of three dimensions----knowledge sharing,co-production and personal interaction.Knowledge sharing and personal interaction reflect the communication among consumers,while cooperative production reflects the interaction between consumer and business/community.(2)The three factors,self-efficacy,brand attachment and relation trust all affect the knowledge sharing,co-production and personal interaction behaviors in the virtual brand community,as well as the achievement,affiliation,and power motivation.The motives of knowledge sharing and personal interaction behaviors of consumers in the virtual brand community include achievements,affiliation,and power,while the co-production behavior is just affected by achievement and power,without affiliation.Among the three factors,self-efficacy has the greatest affect on each type participation behavior,as well as each type motivation.Viewed from the path of the social motivation to the participation behavior,the most significant motive of knowledge sharing behavior is the achievement;the greatest impact on the co-production is the power;and the affiliation motivation has the greatest affects on personal interaction.(3)In the virtual brand community,self-efficacy,brand attachment and relation trust realize their impacts on knowledge sharing behavior with the totally intermediary role of achievement and power motives.Self-efficacy and relation trust affect co-production behavior by the totally intermediary roles of achievement,affiliation and power motives,while the brand attachment affect the co-production behavior by the partly intermediary roles of the three motives.The affect of self-efficacy,brand attachment and relation trust on personal interaction behavior are all achieved by the simultaneous intermediary effects of achievement,affiliation and power.(4)The interaction atmosphere in virtual brand community plays a significant positive moderating role during the influencing of self-efficacy,brand attachment,relationship trust on the knowledge sharing behavior.In the influencing process of the three individual factors,self-efficacy,brand attachment,relationship trust on the co-production and personal interaction behavior,the moderating effect of interaction-atmosphere is relatively weak.The above results proved by this research might make meaningful contribution to improve consumer psychology and behavior theory actively.However confined by the researcher's own academic ability,the research still has a lot of deficiencies,especially in the relatively simple research method,the unrepresentative sample and so on,which meanwhile provides a direction to make breakthrough in the future study.