Research On The Formation Mechanism Of Customer Engagement In Virtual Brand Community

For enterprises,customer's contribution includes not only purchase behavior,but also customer engagement at the psychological and behavioral level.With the development of the Internet and the popularization of personal social network,virtual brand community becomes an important place for customer engagement.Most modern companies have recognized the importance of virtual brand communities.Most of the top 500 companies in the world have their own Facebook accounts,and more than 1.5 million companies have registered on Wechat.Enterprises have regard it as an important marketing method of the company.However the data shows that more than half of the customers leave permanently after their first registration of a community,and the vast majority of users cancel their follow-up to the relevant brand public numbers after the completion of marketing activities immediately.Therefore,the customer engagement of virtual brand community,has become an urgent issue of common concern for academia and industry.The research on the formation of customer engagement mostly starts from the offline by now,rare of them involves the virtual brand community in the context of the Internet.Some scholars have introduced the concept of customer engagement in the context of the Internet,which is only a direct reference as a mature variable in the model.Few studies have been conducted on the formation mechanism of customer agreement at the virtual environment.Even if some scholars use customer engagement as outcome variable to explore the impact of a factor in virtual community,their research tends to focus only on the impact of a single dimension,which does not form a system like it is on the offline.In addition,as a special form of virtual brand community,Wechat public account has attracted 30 million active users.Therefore,take WeChat brand accounts as example to explore the formation mechanism of virtual brand community customer engagement,can improve customer engagement theory,also help operators from the virtual brand community better.Overall,take WeChat brand account as an example,for the formation mechanism of the customer engagement with the virtual brand community has important theoretical and practical meaning.On the basis of previous studies,this thesis takes the stimulus organism response theory as the framework,the external stimulus formed by the virtual brand community customer integration can be divided into three dimensions:community management,community environment and community function.The customer engagement is divided into three levels:customer cognition,customer sentiment and customer activation in behavioral level.And the relationships hypothesis of each dimension are proposed.This thesis finds that:the community environment and community function affect customer engagement in a positive way,community management has a significant negative impact on cognitive engagement and customer sentiment,customer cognition and customer sentiment have a significant positive impact on customer activation.Based on this,this thesis proposes some operational recommendations for virtual brand communities,such as:enterprises should improve management mechanisms,build friendly communities,provide personalized services,etc.