Research On The Impact Of Website Characteristics Of Virtual Brand Community On The Brand Identity

Brand identity is one of the important intangible assets of the company. High brand identity is able to help enterprises to cultivate loyal consumers and improve the competitive advantage of enterprises. At present, with the development of Internet and mobile Internet technology by leaps and bounds, the emerging marketing patterns emerge in endlessly. The customers browse multiple sites and come into contact with a lot of information. How to make consumers continue to focus on a brand for a long time and generate high brand identity has become an important problem that enterprises have to solve. Virtual brand community, which is based on the Internet and mobile technology, is the bridge between consumers and businesses, brand and product. Establish a good virtual brand community can expand brand advantage and improve market share of product. Then, which characteristics of virtual brand community will attract consumer attention? And what is the relationship between website characteristics and brand identity?According to the consideration of the above two questions, the research began with virtual brand community website features and mainly studied the influence of the virtual brand community site characteristics, customer perceived value and brand identity. This paper generalized the previous brand community research and reviewed the related research of virtual brand community, website features, customer perceived value and brand identity. Purpose was to construct the theoretical model of this study and explain influence mechanism of the model by the method of empirical research. The website features of virtual brand community include four dimensions that are technical ease of use, usefulness of content, leisure and entertainment, social interaction. And customer perceived value include two dimensions that are purposive value and social value.The virtual brand community members conducted a questionnaire survey in this paper, and the data was analyzed by analysis software. The empirical results indicated that usefulness of content, leisure and entertainment, social interaction all had significant positive impact on brand identity. But the influence degree of the recreational characteristics was the largest, the social interaction took the second place, usefulness of content was the least. At the same time, technical ease of use had no significant effect on brand identity. Customer perceived value played a mediating role between the website characteristics of virtual brand community and brand identity. According to the results of this study, this paper put forward the suggestions to build a virtual brand community and prospected the future research.Emphasizing on the own characteristics of virtual brand community and discussion influence mechanism of four website characteristics on the brand identity are the innovation points of this study. And this paper provides a new train of thought for the brand management.