Research About The Influence Of The Consumer's Self-congruence On Extended-self Construction In Brand Community

With the development of social media,establishing good and lasting relationship with consumers is thestrategic need for enterprises to improve their performance and gain competitiveness.Therefore,many enterprises have created brand communities and other platforms to interact with consumers frequently,so as to maintain a good customer relationship.However,companies are still exploring how social media works in marketing.In addition,most domestic scholars explore the influencing factors of brand relationship under the traditional background,and the research on how to maintain the customer relationship in the new changes of social environment began to rise in recent years.Therefore,this paper proposes a new perspective,constructing extended-self of consumer as a new measure to maintain the customer relationship in the brand eommunity.The construction of extended-self enhances the emotional connection of consumers with the brand and brand community,beneficial to improve their performance and gain competitiveness.Therefore,on the basis of combing the existing research results,this paper takes the brand community as the research situation.Starting from the self-congruence,this paper discuss the construction of the extended self through the brand love and brand engagement.To explore the influence of self-congruence on extended self-construction,a questionnaire survey was used to collect data through network channels and 361 valid samples were obtained.This paper uses SPSS21.0 and SmartPLS2.0 to analyze the reliability and validity of the data,and also the fitting of the whole model.Results are as follows:in online brand community,self-congruence has a significant positive impact on brand love and brand engagement;Self-congruence and brand engagement have a significant positive impact on brand love,and the effect of brand engagement is stronger camparing with self-congruence;Brand engagement has a significant positive impact on extended-self,but brand love has no significant effect on extended-self.The research results have important significance:this paper establishes extended-self construction model,and verify the existence and significance of the model,providing space for future research.At the same time,there is also an important inspiration for enterprises to maintain the relationship between consumers and brands:enterprises should pay attention to the self-congruence of consumers from the perspective of brand positioning,brand marketing and brand auditting;In the brand community,enterprises should take advantage of brand engagement;Through the self-consistence and brand engagement,enterprises help constmer to construct the extened-self in the brand community.