Research On The Influence Of Brand Community Characteristics On The Brand Relationship Quality

Brand community is a non-geographical social network which is consisted of core brand consumers. Brand community as an important platform of consumers, is a social network that consumers can better conmunicate with each other, it changes the old form of communication of consumers and brand enterprise, making the consumers more powerful, speak out more voice and make more value,and make the brand enterprise understand their customers deeply.The brand community built an important bridge between the consumers and the brand, and is paid close attention to by consumers and the enterprise. From the theory study Angle, there has been some research on how brand community influence on the brand relationshio quality,but it's still not systematic and complete. So further research is necessary to find the mutual relationships, to get related conclusions from comprehensive Angle,and to provide more rules and strategy for operators of the brand communities, customers and the brand enterprise, to promote the growth of the brand enterprise and customer value come true, and to realize three win situation of customers brand enterprise and the brand community.The core question of this study is how brand community promote customer-brand relationship quality. To interprete the core problem, the author start from the characteristics of the brand community,by theoratical analysis and the actual interviews,the author firstly construct the theoretical framework and components of the brand community. Then the author analysed the influence of the brand community on the customer value perception and customer value invention,and then the influence of customer value on the customer-brand relationship quality. Thus constuct the theoretical frame of " brand community-customer value-brand relationship quality", explained the influential,mechanism of brand community to brand relationship quality, And used the social survey method to verify the theoretical framework.This study obtained several conclusions as follows: Firstly, the author deduced the characteristics of the brand community from the consumer behavior theory, social capital theory, cultural capital theory and technical capital theory, and at the same time interviewed different brand community paticipants.Then came out four characteristics as comsumption informedness,social interaction,common consciousness and technical usefulness.Second, the reseach analyed how brand community characteristics influencing on customer value. Based on the analysis of the literature,the author subdivided customer value into2category,which are customer value perception and customer value invention. And based on this division, the author analyse the mechanism of how brand community characteristics influence on customer value perception and customer value invention. Through empirical research,we found that comsumption informedness,social interaction and technical usefulness have significant positive impact on customer value perception and customer value invention,but common consciousness have no significant impact on customer value perception and customer value invention.This means comsumption informedness,social interaction and technical usefulness is very important for customers to get customer value perception and take part in customer value invention,but common consciousness is not powerful enough to customer value.The third, the author went on analysed and tested the influence of customer value on brand relationship quality. Some former research has proved that customer value peception can promote customer trust, satisfiction and commitment,and this research once again tested the conclusion.At the same time, the author analysed that the customer value inovation has positive influnce on the brand relationship quality,but only been proved by empirical study that the customer satisifaction is positived related to customer value inovation.Then the author give some advice to brand consumers, brand community operators and brand enterprises according to the reasearch results.The innovation points of this study lies in:first,studied the customer-brand relationship quality from the angle of brand community, expand the customer-brand relationship from between sigle consumer and brand to group consumers and brand,thus find out some unique function mechanism, filled the blank of customer-brand relationship quality. Second,the author put customer value perception and customer value invention as important mediating variables,ties consumers in the brand comminity with brand enterprise, especially put customer value invention as important mediating variable,and tested the important impact of customer value in the mediation of brand community and brand relationship quality.Third,empirically tested the influence of brand community on the customer-brand relationship,especially the customer trust and commitment with the brand community.And the research used Chinese context of questionnaire to test the mechanism.Fourth,the author argues four characteristics of the community, which are comsumption informedness,social interaction,common consciousness and echnical usefulness.