Research On Virtual Brand Community Marketing:Strategic Choice, Member Management And Community Governance

In the era of social media, virtual brand community has become an important way for the users to contact the brand. The past research emphasis on consumer's participation in the virtual brand community but little focus on the enterprise research on virtual brand community moreover prior research can't answer, How to build, participate and manage the important issues of virtual brand community? This research conducted three studies to discuss this problem.Firstly, this research analyzes the connotation of the brand community to the virtual community and essence of the virtual brand community. It reveals the participation importance of the virtual brand community, also analyzes the challenges that enterprises are facing in virtual brand community.Secondly, this study summarizes the related theories of virtual brand community, such as the theory of brand and brand community evolution, the social identity theory, the social formation process theory, consumer community participation motivation theory, resource based theory and community experience perspective. It provides a complete and comprehensive view on the understanding of community participation motivation, community formation process, community interaction and community performance.Based on the research background and theoretical analysis, the first study explored the impact of product characteristics on consumer participation in virtual brand communities. Using survey method, this paper examines the impact of product complexity, product satisfaction and product symbolic on consumer participation in virtual brand community. The results show, three kinds of product haracteristics have positive effect on the consumers'participation in virtual brand community. This study also investigated the moderate effect of prouct use length. The research contribute to the strategic choice for the enterprise that wether buliding the virtual brand community.Study two discusses the member management strategy in virtual brand community. Less user participation in the virtual brand community cause lack of activity, lead to low chances of success of virtual brand community marketing. Drawing on the theory of organizational behavior, virtual brand community as a kind of virtual organization, it discusses the influence of the social strategy of virtual brand community on the members'social and the behavior intention. It is found that the socialization strategies of virtual brand community, i.e., information feedback, interactive support and user education, play a positive role in the formation of community members'community identity. Community identity has a positive impact on consumer brand loyalty and community participation.In the study three, the role of virtual brand community in the process of enterprise value creation is discussed from the macro level. In particular, the author take the virtual brand community as a complete economic and social system and discuss how to use the virtual brand community for the user management and value creation process. Taking Xiaomi community as an example, the management and value creation of virtual brand community were studied through the method of case study.In the last part of the paper, the conclusion and significance of the research are discussed and limitations of this research are also mentioned.