The Influence Of Citizenship Behavior On Brand Loyalty In Online Brand Communities

In recent years, the influence of brand community on the consumer market is gradually revealed. More and more companies start to pay attention to the influence of brand community, and have turned to the construction and maintenance of brand community. With the extension of the Internet applications, brand community entities have begun to rely on online cyberspace as a media to achieve further development. Therefore, many brand community entities exhibit a tendency of developing across time and space, and a large number of online brand communities are emerging. Currently, online brand communities(such as C hery Auto C lub "Novelty Army", Harley’s HOG, i Phone Forum "Wei Feng Network," etc.) have evolved into effective new marketing medium of maintaining relationships between companies and their consumer groups, which are not only generally favored by the enterprises, but also caused widespread attention in academic circles. At the same time, the concept, consumers are "part-time employees’ of the enterprises, has been widely disseminated, therefore, the citizen behavior of consumers’ has aroused the interests of the enterprises, and is gradually becoming a key factor to the successfulness of brand communities development and enterprises marketing operations. C urrently, scholars at home and abroad mainly focus their studies of online brand community on the behaviors within the role of consumers(such as purchase intention and purchase behavior, etc.), but ignored the consumers extra behaviors which as we call citizenship behavior. Thus, an exploration of online community consumer behavior has a certain theoretical and practical significance.This study, first, sorted the theoretical basis as well as the study framework made by scholars at home and abroad on online community and brand community, and basing on the existing researches, variables of citizenship behavior and social capital are innovatively introduced into this study. Ultimately, this study has built a assumption model about the effect of citizenship behavior on brand loyalty under the context of online brand community. The empirical results show that:(1) Under the context of online brand community, members actively conduct citizenship behavior(community involvement and altruism), which has positive influence on the social capital of online brand community(interpersonal trust and reciprocity norms).(2) Under the context of online brand community, social capital of communities(interpersonal trust and reciprocity norms) has positive influence on the members’ community identity.(3) Under the context of online brand community, social capital of communities(interpersonal trust and reciprocity norms) has positive influence on the members’ community commitment.(4) Under the context of online brand community, the members’ community identity and community commitment have positive influence on their brand loyalty. Therefore, citizenship behavior(community involvement and altruism) via social capital(interpersonal trust and reciprocity norms) plays a positive role in promoting the members’ community identity and community commitment, and eventually helps to bring about brand loyalty.This study, by introducing organizational citizenship behavior and social capital theory into online brand community, enriches and expands the relevant researches conducted previously. Meanwhile, it will help the enterprises to fully play the role of online brand community in marketing.