Opposing Effects Of Review Spam On Loyal Customers In Firm-initiated Virtual Brand Communities

Virtual brand communities(VBCs)gain more attention from both the firms and customers due to its rich information resources.VBSs play an important role in building and maintaining the strong brands.VBCs play an important role in building and maintaining strong brands that rely mainly on the availability of information in VBCs.Customers often participate inVBCs constructed by a firm to build and maintain their relationship with the firm.However,excessive spam in VBCs seriously affects customer participation.Being one of the first studies to investigate the social and psychological impacts of review spam in the information systems literature,we applied the theory from social psychology to understand how the review spam in VBCs influences community members' psychological awareness and future behavior.Based on previous research,in this paper,we adopted the three categories of review spam,including hyper review of an alternative brand,defaming review of the target brand and non-reviews,and introduced the concept of sense of virtual community(SOVC),then,the mechanism of how the review spam influence the future participation in VBCs is established.In addition,the empirical data used in this paper was multiple data combined with objective data and subjective data.The objective data is crawled in one VBC,and the subjective data is obtained through the questionnaire.Finally,we obtained 144 vaild sample data,and we tested the model which to verify how the review spam influence the sense of virtual community and consumer behavior in VBCs.Based on the analysis of 144 sample data,we found that different types of review spam had opposing impacts on sense of virtual community(SOVC),specifically,hyper review of an alternative brand has positive influence on SOVC,whereas defaming review of the target brand and non-review have negative influence on SOVC,which further influenced customer participation.