| In the era of social media,more and more enterprises began to build brand communities to strengthen ties with consumers.With the increase in the brand community,the coexistence of brand communities of competing brands from the same industry is very common.Brand communities attract users in the same social media environment and promote consumer participation.As the size of the consumer on the market is limited,the consumer's time and energy is limited,there may be some squeeze between the communities.Moreover,due to the openness of the community,the coexistence of the brand communities provides consumers access to participation in multiple brand communities,thus producing links and mutual influence among brand communities.Looking back on the literature of the brand community in the past,there are two noteworthy limitations.First,much of the previous study focused on the community.For example,they pay much attention to consumers' motivations and experience in communities.This kind of research can be seen from the internal brand community,while ignoring the impact of other external brand community.Second,previous studies often assume that consumers are only involved in a single brand community,but ignore the prevalence of consumer multi-community participation.This paper attempts to make up for the above research limitations,answer the following three questions:1.how does the brand communities influence each other and ultimately affect brand performance?This issue focuses on the interaction of the community as a whole.2.What is the internal mechanism of the brand community's interaction?This question answers the impact of multi-brand community involvement from the consumer level,revealing the mechanisms of interaction between communities.3.What is the motivation for the brand community to interact with each other?This question attempts to uncover the intrinsic motivation of multi-brand community participation.This paper is divided into three sub-studies to explore the above three issues,as follows:First,the study focuses on the interaction between multiple brand communities.That is,the multi-brand community coexistence in the competitive environment,the interaction effect of brand community growth and its impact on brand performance.The author based on China's largest open Chinese community-Baidu collected a number of mobile phone brand community time series data,combined with the brand sales data,through the vector autoregressive model(VAR model)on the above issues were discussed.The results show that the size of the content(rather than the size of the membership)is a key variable in brand performance for both the community and the competitive community.Although the size of the focal community is positively affecting the performance of the brand,the effect of content size of competing communities is negative.Moreover,the member size of the competitor brand community has a positive spillover effect on the community,but the scale of the content shows a negative crowding effect.This result shows that competing brand communities impact a focal community and brand negatively.Second,the study two explores the impact of multi-brand community involvement.The involvement of consumers in multi-brand communities has created the interaction between communities.Research II is able to answer the internal mechanism of studying the interaction between communities proposed at the consumer level.Although consumers' participation in multiple brand communities has been very common,the impact of its research is still very limited.In the second study,the author explores the impact of multi-brand community participation on consumer brand attitudes.Specifically,the author took the mobile industry as an example,selected one of the community as the focus of the community,collected users' participation across various communities and their discussion about new products..Through the method of text mining,we get the attitude of consumers to new products,and use Heckman two-stage method to study the influence of multi-community participation and control self-selection bias.The results show that the number of competing brand community participation and social relations negatively affect new product attitudes.But for the focus of the community to participate in a higher degree of consumer,this negative effect will become weaker.Finally,the above studies reveal the interaction effect among communities.But the question that why consumers will participate in multiple brand communities,how many types of that participation there are need to addressed.Answering this question reveals the intrinsic motivation of community interaction.Because of the lack of literature in this area,the third study uses netnography,a qualitative research methods to explore the motivations and types of consumers' participation in multiple brand communities.The results show that there are three multi-brand community involvement types:information-oriented multi-competitive brand community participation,social-oriented multi-competitive brand community participation,and emotional-oriented anti-competitive brand community participation.After obtaining the above preliminary results,the author conducted a confirmatory analysis through a questionnaire survey.Found that the attractive of other brands and more knowledgeable drives consumers to be involved in competitive brand communities that correspond to information-oriented multi-competitive brand communities participation and social-oriented multi-competitive brand communities participation respectively.But "this brand centrism" will positively affect the opposition competition brand community participation,corresponding to the emotional-oriented anti-competitive brand community participation.In general,this study provides a preliminary view of our understanding of multiple brand community participation.After the conclusion of the three subjects,the author summarizes the theoretical and administrative significance of the study of multiple brand communities,and points out the limitations and future research of this paper. |
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