Research For The Influence Of Virtual Brand Community's Network Structure On Customer Engagement

With the development of new media and social marketing,enterprises continue to focus on the cultivation of emotion between customer and brand,and gradually realized to let customers participate in interactions with brand and voluntarily become common developers,so researches about customer engagement came into being.Customer engagement comes from the emotional relationship between the customer and the enterprise,and includes all kinds of non-transaction behavior based on the customer's devotion to the enterprise.Previous studies have shown that brand communities are important platforms to promote customer engagement.The members in the virtual brand community are both the readers of the content and the creators of the content.The performance of the customer's value is not only in purchase intention,but also more reflected in customer engagement behaiors which are beyond money transactions,such as product reviews,word-of-mouth communication,customer interaction,and value co-creation.Individual as a node of virtual brand community's network,so that his perception of the product is not unique and formed in the process of sharing and interacting with other members.Simultaneously,positive opinion leaders with intellectual rights in the community may also have a good impact on followers' attitudes and behaviors to brand.In this study,the individual's network structure environment in the virtual brand community is used as the pre independent variable of customer engagement,and the moderating effect of opinion leaders' influence is discussed.On the basis of theoretical review,this study defines the concepts of virtual brand community's network structure,opinion leadership and customer engagement.This study divides virtual brand community's network structure into four dimensions including size,density,center degree and structural hole,and divides customer engagement into three dimensions including emotional attachment,word-of-mouth communication and value co-creation.Then the dimension partitions are tested in the empirical stage.This study uses LISREL8.7 to analyze the relationship between virtual brand community's network structure and customer engagement,and uses the SPSS 19.0 to analyze the moderating effect of opinion leadership,and then get the influential mechanism among each variable.The results of empirical study show that the measurement scale of each variable has good reliability and validity.The size,density and center degree affect the three dimensions of customer engagement,but structural hole has significant effects on emotional attachment and word-of-mouth communication and has no effect on value co-creation.Opinion leadership makes positive moderating effects on the relationship between virtual brand community's network structure and customer engagement.Based on the empirical results,this study presents recommendations for enterprises to manage virtual brand communities and cultivae opinion leaders.