Research On The Influence Mechanism Of Virtual Brand Community Experience On EWOM

Nowadays,customers' focus has shifted from product quality and price to customer experience generated during contact with the product.The appearance of the virtual brand community enables customer experience transform from traditional passive reception to subjective experience,thus forming value co-creation and experiencing co-creation,which is manifest through word of mouth.With the popularity of social media,sharing and commenting after the customer experience plays a vital role in enterprise's excavation of existing or potential customer needs and improvement of brand products and services.Therefore,how to stimulate consumers to produce electronic word-of-mouth(eWOM)communication through the virtual brand community experience is an important issue for the company.In the existing researches,there is still gap for further research on the brand virtual community experience.Existing researches on virtual brand community experience is mostly based on brand loyalty,flow,involvement,trust,commitment,and satisfaction as outcome variables,while less.exploring the impact mechanism of experience and eWOM communication.And although experience and eWOM have been explored as important variables in the researches of consumer behavior for many times,most researches have conducted general researches on them,regarding them as single-dimension concepts.WeChat brand public account is a special form of virtual brand community,and an important platform for viral marketing on the chain of acquaintances.Exploring the impact of experience on eWOM has critical theoretical and practical significance on the construction of Wechat virtual brand community and brand development.Based on characteristics of the WeChat brand page and traditional brand experience,the virtual brand community experience is divided into six parts:sensory experience,affection experience,thinking experience,relationship experience,interaction experience and entertainment experience.This thesis uses stimulus-organism-response theory and social identity theory,by means of the moderating role of brand identity and community identity,explores the impact mechanism of the virtual brand community experience on eWOM(opinion seeking,opinion giving,and opinion passing).Through empirical research,it is found that relationship experience has significant impact on three types of eWOM behavior.Thinking experience,sensory experience,entertainment experience and affection experience has significant influence on opinion passing and opinion giving through the mediating role of brand identity and community identity.Interactive experience has a direct impact on opinion passing,but cannot significantly affect eWOM through the mediating role of identity.Brand strength has a meditating role in the influence of thinking experience on brand identity.Brand strength also serves as a moderating role in the influencing effect of thinking experience on brand recognition.Brand strength has a moderating role in brand recognition on opinion passing.This thesis enriches the research of virtual brand community experience through the meditating effect of recognition and moderating effect of tie strength.In depth exploration of the influence of different dimensions of experience on three dimensional eWOM provides theoretical references and practical implications for enterprises to participate in and manage virtual brand communities.