Research On Customer Engagement Evolution And Outcome In Online Brand Community

Traditional marketing theory regards customer as marketees of enterprise product(service),and more attention is paid to how to enhance enterprise profits created by customer purchase behaviors through understanding consumer characteristics and preferences.Service dominant logic makes enterprises re-examine consumers' s roles in in the process of value creation.Combined with the development of information technology and appearance of various new media,customer non-purchase behaviors,such as online and offline word-of-mouth,participating in product development,making comments on product experiences,and so on,are getting more and more attention from scholars and enterprise managers,and the concept of customer engagement was brought up.Since then,researchers conducted substantial studies on the antecedents and outcomes of customer engagement,with insightful and deep research results continuously emerging.However,the research on custome engagement in social media is prett y little,whereas online brand communities,forums and other network communication platforms are convenient and universal methods for customer engagement,and the laws of customer engagement in those platforms deserve more attention.Therefore,this paper focuses on customer engagement in online brand community by comprehensive using of grounded theory approach,netnography,structural equation model,and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis,on the basis of the relevant research results at home and abroad.Specifically,this study includes the following three aspects.Firstly,this paper studies the formation mechanism of customer engagement in online brand community.This paper selected cosmetics,movies,laptops and clothing as research targets,collected original materials using focus group and depth interview,and employed grounded theory approach to analyze the materials.After three coding steps of grounded theory approach,namely open coding,axial coding and selective coding,the results show that 17 factors on customer level,product level,company level and environment level play significant roles in the formation process of customer engagement in online brand community.Based on these results,this paper constructed formation mechanism model of customer engagement in online brand community.Secondly,this paper studies the process of positive and negative customer engagement in online brand community.This paper targeted Xiaomi online community,and employed netnography method to study the process phases of positive and negative customer engagement in online brand community,and provide a clear perspective on the difference of positive and negative customer engagement process in online brand community.The results show that positive customer engagement could be divided into learning,sharing,advocating,socializing,co-developing and social enhancing,whereas negative customer engagement should be analyzed separately from long term and short term.In the short run,negative customer engagement could be divided into venting,constructive discuss,threatening to withdraw,negotiation,revenge(compromise or disengagement).In the long run,negative customer engagement could either transform into positive customer engagement or exit.Based on these results,this paper constructed theoretical model of positive and negative customer engagement process in online brand community.Finally,this paper studies the influence of customer engagement on customer purchase intention in online brand community.Customer purchase intention could be divided into repurchase intention and cross-buying intention based on depth / breadth.On this basis,this paper analyzed the influence mechanism of customer engagement in online brand community on customer repurchase intention and cross-buying intention,the regulating effect of regulatory focus,proposed relevant hypothesis,and construct theoretical model of the influence of customer engagement in online brand community on customer purchase intention.In the empirical analysis phase,firstly structural equation model was employed to verify the theoretical model,and the results show that customer engagement in online brand community positively affects brand identification and communit y identification.Brand identification,company identification and communit y identification could positively affect customer repurchase intention and cross-buying intention.Regulatory focus plays a regulating effect between customer engagement in online brand community and community identification.Then,this paper employed fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to explore the influence of configurations of customer engagement in online brand community,brand identification,company identification,community identification,and regulatory focus on customer repurchase intention and cross-buying intention.Structural equation model could distinguish the influence degree of different antecedents on outcomes,whereas fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis could clarify the effects of different configurations of antecedents on outcomes.These two methods discuss relationship between antecedents and outcomes from two different perspectives,enriching research results.Based on the above analysis,this paper systematically discusses the formation,process,and outcome of customer engagement in online brand community.Research reults could not only provide a better understanding of customer engagement,but also provide valuable references for enterprises' marketing practices in China.