The Model Of Antecedents And Consequences Of Consumer Engagement In Online Brand Communities

With the development of Internet technology, many companies have built online brand communities with the official website BBS, microblogging and social media. Consumers can get the latest company news and product information from the brand community, share their experience with other consumers, establish contact with other community members, and participate in marketing activities organized by the company or community. Consumers are more active to engage in the production of enterprises and brand activities, and to co-create value with the enterprise. Consumer engagement has greatly changed the traditional relationship paradigm between enterprise and consumers. However, although some companies can make full use of consumer engagement to shape the brand and establish fans economy, some companies still failed to attract consumers’participation. Therefore, this article will focus on the characteristics of the enterprise and discuss which factors can affect consumer engagement, so as to help companies choose their own network communication strategies.In this paper, a new model of antecedents and consequences of consumer engagement in online brand communities is constructed based on the theory of online brand community and consumer engagement. This paper argues that consumer engagement, as a specific form of active consumer participation and value co-creation, is mainly influenced by the characteristics of brand and product. We divide the characteristics of the brand into brand uniqueness and brand self-expression, and the characteristics of the product into technology complexity and use of exploration.Through questionnaire survey of users from Xiaomi Community and structural equation model analysis, this paper draws the following conclusions:(1) Brand identification and product involvement have a positive influence on consumer engagement in online brand communities. (2) Brand uniqueness and self-expression can positively influence brand identification, and then have a positive impact on online community engagement. (3) Technical complexity and use of exploration can positively affect product involvement that can also indirectly affect online community engagement through involvement. (4) Consumer engagement in online brand communities can increase repeated purchase behavior and promote consumers to participate in new product development and co-create value with companies.The theoretical significance of this paper lies in the following three aspects:(1) The measurement scale of consumer engagement in online brand communities is verified. (2) The antecedents of consumer engagement in online brand communities are verified. Brand identity and product involvement are important variables which affect consumer engagement. (3) For IT products, we find that the exploration and technical complexity of the product will highly influence product involvement, and further affect consumer engagement in online communities.This paper is of great significance to study the online brand community engagement, which mainly lies in providing a model of consumer engagement in brand communities to explore the antecedents and consequences of community engagement. In addition, this paper also discusses the guilding significance of the results on social media marketing of enterprises.