Research On The Influence Mechanism Of Virtual Brand Community Climate On Customer Loyalty

Brand communities orgaise around increased communication among users of aparticular brand/product, toued as a possible path to‘the Holy Grail of brand loyalty’. In theprocess of sharing the knowledge,feelings of products,participants in the brand communitiesinteract and spread positive word-of-mouth, which fulfills the enterprises’commercial andsocial needs. With the development of the Internet, virtual brand communities emerge as‘theupgraded network of brand communities’. However, virtual brand communities are differentfrom the offline brand communities in five ways:the entry/exit cost, interaction, relationshipbuilding ways, participation motivation and the speed of development.Considering the newtraits and rapid development, this research defined and studied the virtual brand communities.With the ever-increasing impact of the Internet, these following issues are important forcoporations to figure out: (1)how virtual brand communities influence participants’ attitudesand behaviors, (2)how to specify the internet marketing strategy. For these reasons, thisresearch set virtual brand community as the research background, trying to explore theinfluencial mechanism of virtual brand community climate on customer loyalty, to providetheoretical support for Internet brand strategies.Based on the existing brand communities and virtual brand communities researches, theauthor identified that although these researches are fruitful, the defferences between thevirtual brand communities are still ambiguous.Moreover, most researches focusd on theindividual driving factors of brand communities, negelcting the environmentalones.Considering the importance of environmental facotors, this research defined the conceptand dimensions of‘virtual brand communities climate’and established the concept model ofvirtual brand community climate on the customer loyalty based on the literature review,brainstorm and interviews. To provide more detailed guidance recommendations, this paperintroduced membership duration and participate frequency as the moderator variable,revealed their moderate role in the virtual brand community climate on communityidentification.Using SPSS19.0 and Lisrel 8.7, this research made an empirical study by analyzing thedata, which are collected by questionnaires, to reveal the veracity of the proposed model. Theresult shows: (1)virtual brand community climate can be divided into six dimensions:freedom, knowledge sharing, support, rewarding, innovation and structure;(2)community identification can partly mediates the influencial relationship between freedom,support andcustomer loyalty; (3) community identification can fully mediates the influencial relationshipbetween innovation, structure and customer loyalty;(4) the moderate effects of membershipduration and participate frequency are not significant. Finally, according to the conclusions,this paper discussed the implications and areas for future research .