The Research On The Formation Paths Of Brand Community Commitment To Brand Loyalty

The online brand community have become a widely used medium for information, enabling conversations across a broad range of topics and contexts, for social support and belonging。The companies support the development of online brand community positively just for understanding the consumers’ need and ideas, transforming the online community commitment to brand loyalty, and increasing the profit.To some extant, brand community can advance community members or customers form brand commitment or brand loyalty, therefore, it has important meanings to the corporate to understand the shift mechanism between brand community and brand loyalty. However, the previous research considers that brand community commitment could foster brand loyalty directly, lacking deep research to the middle effect mechanism. This study divides brand community commitment adopted by Bateman et al.,(2009) into three dimensions:Continuance Community Commitment, Affective Community Commitment, Normative Community Commitment. Continuance Community Commitment is a bond between a member and a particular community that is based on the member’s belief that his or her involvement provides net benefits that are not easily available elsewhere. Affective Community Commitment is a bond between a member and a particular community that is based on the member’s strong emotional attachment to that community. Normative Community Commitment is a bond between a member and a particular community that is based on the member’s sense of obligation towards that community. As the concept and dimension of brand attachment, this research adopts the classification:brand-self correlation and brand prominence.This study has two main purposes:first, explores whether brand attachment mediates the relationship between the three dimensions of brand community commitment and brand loyalty, and the types of the mediating effects, the full mediating or the partial mediating; secondly, test the contribution differences that the three dimensions of brand community commitment foster brand loyalty.This paper randomly input items of different dimensions into the "Questionnaire Star".404valid questionnaires have been reserved. The result shows that brand attachment fully mediates the relationship between Continuance Community Commitment and brand loyalty, partially mediates the relationship between Affective Community Commitment and brand loyalty, fully mediates the relationship between Normative Community Commitment and brand loyalty. Finally, the researcher proposes the shortcomings of this study and the future research directions.