Virtual Brand Community Participation In The Impact Of Research On Brand Loyalty

Virtual communities have been more and more important, it can reduce the effort to find and participate in a community, break the restricts of time and space, and create real value for the customers. At the same time, virtual communities can fulfill the social and commercial needs of the company, managing virtual communities will be the core competence of the electronic commerce.Based on the literature review, the author identifies that more and more researchers have mentioned that virtual communities can influence the customer relationship involvement and brand building, but there was no quantitative research about those. Also researchers began to study the interplay between brand and brand communities based on the latest literatures, these researchers pointed out that care must also be taken to the other types of brand communities, such as virtual enthusiast-run communities, and further research should be taken to understand the antecedents of consumer's participation in brand communities. By referring to the researches of virtual communities and brand communities, this study examined the relationship between motivations and behaviors of participation, and the relationship between participation and brand loyalty. Empirical results have shown as follows:1. Participation in virtual brand communities was found has positive impact to brand loyalty. And difference levels of participation have difference impact on brand knowledge, brand identification and brand loyalty, high interactive participation has greater impact to those factors.2. Community identification has great impact to the consumer's participation and brand identification.3. Different perceived values have different impact to the community identification, the motivations of maintain social connectivity and social enhancement have great impact to the community identification.4. Different perceived values have different impact to the consumer's participation. Instrumental value has greater impact to consumer's behavior of browsing, while information value, maintaining social connectivity value and social enhancement value have great impact to consumer's higher interactive behavior.