A Study On The Impact Of Customer Participation In Co-creation On Customer Engagement In Virtual Brand Community

With the virtual brand community rising,the traditional way of value creation has changed,reflecting that customers have taken the initiative in the enterprise brand,creating a new marketing model of word-of-mouth economy.In this way,the virtual brand community becomes a typical platform for value co-creation,which has attracted extensive attention from practice enterprises.However,many virtual brand community's actual utilization efficiency is indiferent.The possible reasons are that some enterprises for the sake of a quick profit making excessive intervention behavior,which ignore the customer's psychological factors,besides,the stickiness of customer is not strong in the virtual brand community,"one-stop" search and browsing behaviors abounding,customers lacking of communication,which result in the loss of cutomers in the community.Therefore,the way to improve the degree of customer engagement and establish long-term and stable relationship with customers is the key to ensure the stable development of virtual brand community.At the same time,the academic research also attaches great importance to customer engagement,and has done some relevant research,but lacking of the empirical research which in the view of value co-creation.In view of this,this study will explore the internal mechanism of customer participation in value co-creation on customer engagemrnt in virtual brand community from the perspective of social exchange theory,and test the mediating effect of psychological ownership and the moderating effect of community support.This study focus on the social exchange theory to make a theoretical and empirical study on the influence mechanism of customer participation in value co-creation on customer engament in virtual brand community.In the theoretical part,this study summarize and sort out the connotation,dimension and related research of value co-creation,psychological ownership,customer engagement and community support,and constructs a preliminary theoretical model.In the empirical part,this study constructs a research model from the perspectives of social exchange theory,and designs a questionnaire based on relevant literature.With the help of SPSS22.0 and AMOS22.0 data analysis software,the empirical results show that :(1)initiated value co-creation and spontaneous value co-creation both have a significant positive impact on customer engagement;the impact of spontaneous value co-creation on customer engagement is higher than the impact of initiated value co-creation on customer engagement(2)psychological ownership mediates the relationship between initiated value co-creation and customer engagement and the relationship between spontaneous value co-creation and customer engagement;(3)community support can play a positive moderated effect in spontaneous value creation and customer engagment.When the degree of community support of customers is high,spontaneous value co-creation has a strong positive effect on psychological ownership.Besides,community support can moderate the effect of psychological ownership in the relationship between spontaneousvalue co-creation and customer engagement.Finally,the empirical results are analyzed and discussed in this paper,which further enriches the theoretical research of value co-creation and customer engagement in the virtual brand community.It is of practical significance to carry out value co-creation activities for enterprises and maintain the stable development of the virtual brand community.