Customer Behavior And Results In The Process Of Value Creation And Interaction

In the Internet and Mobile Internet age, the customer contact points are heighly variable and rich, and customer group possess the great initiative and influence, such as driving direction of speech, building reputation economy and reversing enterprise brand, the role of customer has transformed from value’s passive recipient to value’s co-creator, and in the virtual brand community situation, the change of the customer’s force and role is particularly outstanding. Virtual brand community has become an important platform for many enterprises to establish good relations between enterprise and customer and an important medium of corporate marketing, in order to cultivate loyal customers for the enterprise. But not all of virtual brand communities have excellent performance, the high proportion of the negative members and the zombie members becomes an obstacles for the sustainable development of the community. How to maintain and promote the sustainable development of virtual brand community has become an important issue for enterprises and/or platform.Virtual brand community is an interacting virtual community with the theme of brand and is a typical platform of value co-creation, it provides customers with greater interactive opportunity than offline way.With the help of the platform customer can interact with the platform service personnel and other customers, interaction is seen as an stage of value co-creation of which the process consists of two stages(resourec integration and interaction) and interaction is a behavior trace of value co-creation. Thus it can be seen that customer is a kernel of the interaction and that the importance of customer for virtual brand community is self-evident. So, in the virtual brand community context,what behaviors does customer carry out in the interactive process of value co-creation? And then how do these behaviors influence the sustainable development of virtual brand community? Therefore, this study focuses on customer that is the core main body of value co-creation, and discuss what behaviors does customer carry out and what results emerge from these behaviors in the interactive process of value co-creation.Firstly, the paper explores customer behaviors in the interactive process of value co-creation. To lead customer to participate actively in virtual brand community and to achieve value co-creation amomg customer, enterprise/platform and other stakeholders through various forms of interaction is an important means of the current enterprise competition, also becomes a hot topic of academic fields. For the enterprise, customer’s behavior in the interactive process of value co-creation is very important, then how to measure the behavior is always a difficult problem to academia, so to explore the customer’s implementation behaviors in the interactive process of value co-creation is one of the research targets. Through the ways of literature research,Web log method, interview method and situational experience, the dimensions of customer value co-creation interactive behavior within virtual brand community are extracted, the measuring model is constructed which is comprised of five dimensions: seeking helping,personal interaction, feedback, advocacy helping, and the measuring scale including 15 items is developed. Through exploratory factor analysis, the study extracts four dimensions of customer value co-creation interactive behavior. Through confirmatory factor analysis, a series of empirical data shows that the scale has good internal consistency, structure validity,convergent validity, and discriminant validity. Based on the interactive view, customer value co-creation behavior within virtual brand community comprises four dimensions: seeking helping, personal interaction, feedback and advocacy.Secondly, the paper explores the value types achieved by customer and their formation mechanism. The ultimate customer is the most important subject of value co-creation, his pursuit maximum co-created value for himself dominates all the behaviors of the value network, that is to say, all activities of the value network are intended to enable the ultimate customer to achieve value. Thus it can be seen, for customers,they pay more attention to creating their own value relative to platform/enterprise value, and co-creating customers’ experience value is customer’s purpose and ultimate appeal of value co-creation activities.Platform/enterprise has to provide value proposition with customer or works with customers to create value that meets customer needs.Therefore, the goal of the enterprise is no longer to create value for customer, but to encourage customer to create the value of their own needs from the enterprise’s providing services, thereby giving impetus to the ascension of the enterprise value. Interaction is an interactive process,customer implements value co-creation behaviors in interaction process,and do these interactive behaviors certainly create value? So it is the second of the research targets that customer’s obtaining the value type and its formation mechanism is explored in the interactive process of value co-creation. This study thinks that customer experience value includes use value, recreational value and social value, and constructs the second theoretical model that how customer value co-creation interactive behaviors affect customer experience value. The study data is obtained through the way of online questionnaire survey, and the effect of the interactive behavior on customer experience value is verified by using structural equation. The results show that (1) help seeking and feedback are both value co-creation and value co-destruction behaviors, because help seeking significantly has a positive impact on use value, but significantly has a negative impact on social value, and feedback has a positive impact on social value, but has a negative impact on recreational value; (2)interpersonal interaction and advocacy are both value co-creation behaviors and do not lead to value co-destruction, because interpersonal interaction has a positive impact on recreational value and social value, and advocacy has a negative impact on use value ,recreational value and social value.Last but not the least, the paper explores how customer experience values impact on customer loyalty. Highly loyal customer is the key to the sustainable development of virtual brand community, and customer loyalty has become the most important, the most valuable and the most stable of assets for enterprises/platform. Virtual brand community is the common carrier of community and brand, and What are the dimensions of customer loyalty? How do customer experience values drive customer loyalty? The resolution of these problems has become the third goal of this study. This study thinks that customer loyalty of virtual brand community mainly includes community loyalty and brand loyalty, and constructs the third theoretical model that how customer experience value affect customer loyalty. The results show that: (1)practical value and social value not only promote customer to be loyal to community, but also drive customer to be loyal to brand, and their influence on community loyalty is greater than on brand loyalty.(2)entertainment value does not significantly effect on community loyalty and brand loyalty.(3)the effect of practical value and social value on community loyalty are fully mediated by the effect of brand loyalty, and the effect of practical value and social value on brand loyalty are fully mediated by the effect of community loyalty.The innovations of this dissertation are as follows:(1) Measurement model of customer value co-creation interactive behavior which is comprised of seeking helping, personal interaction,feedback and advocacy, is constructed and validated. Customer will need to participate in the process of value co-creation in the field of production and consumption, and customer’s role as the core is more and more prominent in the process of the value co-creation. Scholars have discussed respectively value co-creation in the production field and in the consumption field, but the value co-creation of vitual brand community can occur both in the field of production and consumption, and includes both value co-creation of B2B and of B2C. In fact, it is not important that value co-creation occur in which field, and it is important that the core subject of value co-creation, namely customer, is willing to implement what value co-creation interactive behaviors. Therefore, it is the key to break the domain boundaries of value co-creation and to discuss the customer value co-creation interactive behavior. Virtual brand community is a typical platform of value co-creation, and interaction is a behavior trace of value co-creation, so it is essential and necessary that dimension structure and measurement of customer value co-creation interactive behavior are explored.(2) Two structure equation models of the relationship among customer value co-creation interactive behaviors, customer experience values and customer loyalty are proposed and verified. This paper discusses the composition dimension of customer experience value and customer loyalty, and builds the model of customer value co-creation interactive behavior impacting on customer experience value and the model of customer experience value impacting on customer loyalty.Therefore, this research is based solely on the customer for the study of the main line to explore the benefits and the results of customer value co-creation interactive behavior bringing for customers. This paper will push the study on virtual brand community into a key and core study area,namely, a study on the dynamic interaction result of customer.(3) The relationship model between community loyalty and brand loyalty is built and verified. Customer loyalty is divided into community loyalty and brand loyalty, and the action mechanism between them is verified, namely, brand loyalty plays a complete mediating role between customer experience value and community loyalty, and community loyalty plays a complete mediating role between customer experience value and brand loyalty. Previous scholars have respectively explored the leading factors of brand loyalty or community loyalty in the study on customer loyalty of virtual brand community, but have not studied their relationship, moreover, the role of the relationship between the two embodies the action mechanism between virtual brand communities as a kind of virtual community and its bearing the theme. This provides a new perspective to the research of customer loyalty.