Research On The Effects Of Brand Virtual Community Interaction On Customer Willingness To Co-creation

Brand virtual community has become an important way for communication andinteraction between the enterprises and customers. The maintenances of customerinteraction in virtual brand communities can not only allow customers to get a goodcommunity experience, but also lead customers more willing to participate in thecompany’s innovation program. This paper studies the impact of interaction in brandvirtual community on the willingness of customers to participate in innovation.According to the brand virtual community interaction theory, this thesis perceives thesense of control and feedback to measure customer interaction experience in virtualcommunity, while using the sense of presence obtained by customers in the virtualcommunity as an intermediary variable to study the impact of interaction on thewillingness of customers to participate in innovation. In this paper, questionnaire survey isthe way to gather the data of customer brand perceived virtual community interaction,sense of presence and willingness to participate in innovative, while structural equationmodeling is the way to test the hypothesizes.Empirical results show that customer perceived interaction in virtual brandcommunity have significant influence on the willingness of customer co-creation throughsocial presence and feedback also has significantly positive effect on the willingness ofcustomer co-creation directly. It has three theoretical contributions as follows. Firstly itdevelops the relationships between interaction in virtual brand community and thewillingness of customer co-creation, which enriches the studies about customer behaviorsin virtual brand community. Secondly it introduces the social presence theory to the studyof the impact mechanism about consumer behavior in virtual brand communities, whichenriches the intermediary role of researches in virtual brand community. Thirdly, with theperceived handling and perceived feedback in virtual community, it measures theinteraction in brand virtual community, which is the new perspective of the study on thestudy of customer interaction.