Research On The Influence Of Virtual Brand Community Participation Behavior On Customer Engagement

With the development of information network technology,people's communication is no longer constrained by time and space,and profound changes have taken place in the way of work and life.The virtual brand community(VBC)is also a product of the network era,which is a new type of network community formed by consumers with the same brand preferences.The emergence of VBC is a huge opportunity and challenge for enterprises,because of its advantages such as free from time and space constraints,low cost and high efficiency,it can enable enterprises to effectively carry out brand relationship marketing,create good consumer-brand relationship and the interconnection between consumers and others.Customer engagement is a behavior other than consumer purchase,effective customer engagement can bring great value to enterprises and maintain a sustainable and positive relationship between enterprises,more and more enterprises begin to attach importance to customer engagement as a key factor.As a new communication platform,VBC has gradually become an important place for enterprises to build their own competitive advantages and promote customer engagement.Most enterprises begin to choose to promote customer engagement by establishing VBC for relationship marketing,however,due to less research on customer engagement in academia,enterprises lack theoretical guidance in the process of practice and often encounter various problems,which results in the opposite.Therefore,how to make better use of the VBC to carry out marketing under the background of complex and changeable market environment and effectively enhance customer engagement is a problem that all enterprises should consider.Based on the above,this paper chooses the virtual brand community participation behavior to study,introduces community identity as a mediating variable,studies the impact of participation behavior on customer engagement,and explores the moderating role of community support in customer participation and community identity.Firstly,the related literatures of the predecessors are studied and sorted out,the preliminary theoretical model of this study is formed.Then a questionnaire is designed to conduct an empirical analysis of the collected data.The research finds that:(1)the participation behavior to community identity and customers engagement has significant positive effects,(2)community identity plays a mediating role between participation behavior and customer engagement,(3)sense of community support plays a positive moderating role in the relationship between participation behavior and community identity.Finally,according to the conclusion of study,the paper puts forward feasible marketing suggestions for enterprises,and looks forward to the future research.