A Study On The Impact Of Brand Community Interaction On Customer Citizenship Behavior

In today’s society, the development of the network makes people’s life attitudes and values changed a lot,thus the social behavior is different from the traditional way. Consumers make decisions not only on the basis of their previous purchase experience, but also search through the network or involved directly in the interaction of brand communities, thus make conditions for the development of brand communities. Consumers use brand community for searching brand information, sharing brand experience,showing product tips,it has become the consumers’ normal life and reality.Through the management of friend circle of brand communities, consumers can interact with others who has similar background,life history and brand experience.which can make communication and interaction more convenient and may resonate to the topics.As a result,more and more consumers choose to enter brand community.For enterprises,brand communities can gather consumers with a special liking to a certain brand,sharing their awareness and experience of the brand.This kind of information from consumers is considered to be authentic, forthright and provocative without any commercial purpose, thus more likely to attract other potential consumers and influence their buying decisions.Brand community has got the attention of many disciplines and research, there is no doubt that as a kind of effective marketing tool, the development of brand community brings new research focus to the marketing world. Under the network environment, explaining the marketing behavior only through the 4p in marketing has limitations. Since Muniz and O’Guinn first put forward the concept of brand community, domestic and foreign scholars have carried on the thorough research on the brand community, and are involved in the specific concept and connotation of the brand community, community evolution mechanism, applied research and related issues.In the real process of service delivery, in addition to the "responsibility" of purchasing, customers also perform part of the employee’s duties,for instance, actively introduce brands or products to other customer, take the initiative to share brand experience of their own,guide potential customers to purchase products in a right process, etc. Such behavior is called the customer citizenship behavior. It is obvious that the behavior has positive significance both for the enterprises and other potential consumers. This study introduces customer brand engagement as an intervening variable, at the same time,discuss whether and how brand community interaction influence customer citizenship behavior based on the theory of brand community and customer interactions,to look forward to a more thorough understanding of the formation mechanism of customer citizenship behavior in the brand community.First of all, this research regard brand community as the research object, the interaction of brand community as the starting point of research, brand community interaction, customer brand engagement and their effects on customer citizenship behavior as the research content.Through the integrated use of the theoretical research and empirical research method,studies and discusses the internal logic relationship between the three variables. By reviewing the main research achievements of brand community, interaction, customer brand engagement, customer citizenship behavior, put forward research hypotheses using logic deductive, and then constructs the integrated model which explaining the effect of brand community interaction on customer citizenship behavior.Secondly, a research scale is designed combining previous research results after the concept model established.The hypotheses are verified through the questionnaire survey and relevant statistical analysis. The results showed that:(1) brand community interaction,including two-way communication, customer participation and joint problem solving,has a significant positive influence on the customer’s cognitive engagement, affective engagement and behavioral engagement; (2) the customer’s cognitive engagement, affective engagement and behavioral engagement have significant positive effects on customer citizenship behavior; (3) the customer brand engagement plays a partial mediation role in the process of brand community interaction affecting customer citizenship behavior.Lastly, according to the research conclusion, some proposals are put forward to the management practice of the enterprises. Start from the methods of constructing brand community and strengthening interaction,the specific proposals are summarized as four aspects,that is improving communication channels,enhancing the level of customer participation,encouraging members to solve problems together,stimulating their degree of brand engagement.