Research On The Impact Of Virtual Brand Community On Consumer Loyalty

It offers more opportunities for enterprises to carry out brand communication in the environment of Internet popularization.The virtual platform has strengthened the communication between consumers and enterprises,and further improved customer loyalty,which has also become an important means of brand management.Under the background,researchers put forward the concept of virtual brand community.Based on the review on the concept analysis and summarization on the interaction on consumers and enterprises,we made detail analysis on psychological foundation from consumer participation and motivation in virtual brand communities,and found that the impact on customer loyalty involved the direct and indirect paths,in which the objective factors included infrastructure ',interactive space,opinion leaders and others,while the subjective factors covered self-realization,inner perception,brand trust,satisfaction and etc.al.Through detail analysis,the above factors in the subjective and objective worked together on the virtual brand community.There are already some research achievements,but still some shortcomings exist.At first,more researches focused on qualitative analysis,and it lacked quantitative research,especially from the scientometrics.Secondly,no attention paid to the connection between function of virtual brand community and consumer demand.And based on the connection,the theoretical model was proposed with the further consideration on perception factors.Thirdly,we were still lack of comparison on different factors based on empirical research,so as to represent the influencing path and interaction strength.For these shortcomings,the research retrieved the relative papers and patents in the field in the past 16 years,and made visualization analysis to position the hotspots,mainly including demand hierarchy theory,planned behavior theory,consumer research,personalization,precision,etc.al.And then with the grounded theory analysis,the paper recognized three key perspectives to analyze the virtual brand community on consumer loyalty,involving demand,perception and behavior result.With these above factors,the paper established theoretical framework of the whole research.In the demand factor,it included interaction,reciprocity,belonging,entertainment and negative evaluation.And in the perception factor,there were behavioral attitude,subjective norm,and perceptual behavior,while behavior results included two dimensions of satisfaction and loyalty.Then we further demonstrated theoretically the inner mechanism of the virtual brand community impact on customer loyalty and built a theoretical model,in which virtual brand communities affected customer loyalty by means of interaction,reciprocity,belonging,entertainment and negative evaluation to achieve consumer satisfaction directly or indirectly.And in addition to negative evaluations,the direct affections were positively adjusted by the behavioral attitude,subjective norm,perceptual behavior and some other perception factors,while indirect effects were through the mediating role of satisfaction.Empirical studies from the perspective of structural equation model have further validated the theoretical model,and the interesting conclusions are included:firstly,the direct effects,interactive,sense of belonging,reciprocity,entertaining and negative evaluation impacts on the loyalty were significantly.At the same time,the above four direct effects were significantly adjusted by behavioral attitude,subjective norm,and perceptual behavior.Secondly,in the indirect effect test,we found that the indirect effects of interaction,reciprocity,belonging and entertainment on loyalty also passed the significance test.Thirdly,according to the regression coefficient,a comparative analysis showed that(1)in terms of the adjustment effect,it was the perceptual behavior<behavioral attitude<subjective norm,while in the reconciliation effect,it was behavioral attitude<subjective norm<perceptual behavior.And in the sense of belonging effect it was the behavior attitude<perceptual behavior<subjective norm,and in the degree of regulation effect of entertainment,it was behavior attitude<subjective norm<perceptual behavior;(2)In terms of indirect effect size,the four independent variables of interaction,reciprocity,belonging and entertainment were all indirectly affect loyalty through satisfaction,but the mediating effect of satisfaction in the process of different independent variables were different.The order of mediating effect was;reciprocity<entertainment<interactivity<belonging;(3)Compared direct effect of four independent variables to indirect effect,the paper found that the direct effect was greater than the indirect effect with the analysis.In conclusion,the above variables all played a major role in the direct effect in the process of the impact on loyalty.