Research On The Impact Of Value Co-creation In Tourism Virtual Community On Online Travel Company’s Brand Value

The fast development of information and model communication technology strengthens the function of internet, which provides a great platform for people to share information, exchange views, express thoughts, show feelings and complete trades. Thus, the internet provides a platform for consumers to participate in the organization value creation process, and also provides businesses a unique opportunity to take advantage of the consumers’ innovative potential and knowledge. Development of internet technology not only creates virtual communities, but also leads to the flourish of tourism virtual communities. The emergence of virtual communities provides businesses and consumers an open space and unprecedented opportunities to work together to create values. The opportunities that Internet platform provides and the expectation of consumers who wants to intervene information make the value co-creation become a reality in practice. In theory, the traditional opinions of value creation has been challenged while value co-creation concept becomes more popular. Two views of value co-creation have been formed:The view based on customer experience and the view based on service dominant logic. The core idea of the two views is that consumers have become co-creators of value.Brand value is a typical case of value co-creation, and brand equity is determined by consumers and businesses. Tourism virtual community is a typical value co-creation platform, an open and interaction space which provides opportunities for consumers and businesses to co-create value. However, how is the brand value co-created by consumers and businesses? In other words, how does value co-creation affect the generation of brand value? What are the activities of value co-creation? How to make use of value co-creation to raise the business brand in the tourism virtual community environment? These are the key issues this article explores.This article build a model of how value co-creation impacts on band value a virtual community tourism environment and proposed research hypotheses after doing in-depth theoretical studies. Scale of the questionnaires and empirical interviews are made in accordance to the theoretical results and discussions of focus group. According to empirical research, in the tourism virtual community environment, value co-creation consists of sponsored value co-creation and autonomous value co-creation; constituted; customer experience is made up of information experience and affective-think experiences. Brand satisfaction, brand trust-loyalty and brand relationship constitute brand value. The empirical results show that:value co-creation in tourism virtual communities has a significant positive impact on the customer experience, and the effects that autonomous value co creation has on the customer information experience is especially significant; the value co(?)creation has a significant positive impact on brand value, and autonomous value co(?)creation has more effects on the brand satisfaction and brand relationship and has more significant positive impact on brand trust-loyalty; customer experience has played an intermediary role of value co-creation and brand value.Finally, according to the empirical research, this paper makes some recommendations for the brand value management of online tourism companies and virtual communities:changing brand marketing logic, improving the function of virtual community as platform of customer experience and brand value creation, valuing the input and support of tourism companies and virtual communities, and encouraging tourists to participate in community interaction. Conclusions of this study make some supplements for current theory, which has important practical implications for online travel companies and communities.