The Study On The Driving Factors Of Member Interactions And Their Effects On The Brand Identification In The Context Of Virtual Brand Community

The application of the Internet has boosted the emergence of E-marketing.As an important means of E-marketing,virtual brand community has gradually shown its great commercial value.Through the virtual brand community platform,enterprises can bring scattered target consumers together,and convey the brand information better with the influence of group leaders and the word of mouth.With the help of virtual brand community,we can establish links with members more quickly and conveniently.Meanwhile,we can develop the customers' sense of identity and dependence on the brand,and transform potential consumers into the actual consumers.Member interaction is vital to virtual brand community.Through literature research,we found that,at present,interaction has been studied by some scholars.But for the antecedents of interaction and their influence on the brand awareness have not been researched systematically.In this context,this study will pay more attention on the driving factors of members' interaction and its influence on brand identity based on the virtual brand community.Firstly,we review some relevant concepts,such as brand community,virtual community,virtual brand community,community interaction,brand identity and so on.Then analyze the state of the development and research of virtual brand community.Lastly,we construct our research model based on the social identity theory.Through literature review and field survey,we summarize that member interaction is affected by community features and member characteristics.Community features can be divided into two aspects.They are group leaders and system quality.The member characteristics can be divided into two dimensions,too.They are brand involvement degree and personal trait.Member interaction is the core of the research.The member interaction can be divided into two dimensions: information interaction and social interaction.Discuss the value of interaction,and build the mechanism on brand identity.Through network questionnaire research,we have collected 506 valid questionnaires.We apply SPSS 20.0 Statistics tool and AMOS18 software to make descriptive analysis,reliability analysis,validity analysis,and hypothesis test.Then we draw the following conclusions:(1)The driving factors of member interaction include two aspects: community features and member characteristics.The influence of community features on interaction isgreater than the effect of member characteristics;(2)The effects of group leaders on information interaction and social interaction are all significant.The influence of system quality on information is significant,but its influence on social interaction is not direct.(3)Brand involvement degree affects information interaction and social interaction significantly.Personal trait affects information interaction significantly,but personal trait can not influence the social interaction directly.(4)The online information interaction and offline social interaction of member affect brand identification significantly.The impact of the former is greater than the latter.Although some inevitable limitations exist in this paper,such as the research content and the chosen samples.There are still some advantages in this study.From the theoretical significance,this study focused on the driving factors of the member interaction and classified the factors.And this study analyzed the formation of the mechanism of member interaction and explored its influence on brand identification.This study is complementary to the driving factors and aftereffect of the member interaction.From the practical significance,through this research,enterprises can realize the value of virtual brand community.For the community managers,they can come to know how to improve community member interaction and how to make marketing suggestions so as to enhance the brand equity.Therefore enterprises can know how to set up virtual brand community and how to create excellent experience for the members.