Identification Of Opinion Leaders And Value Co-creation With Them In Virtual Brand Communities

With the development of information technology,more and more enterprises are paying attention to consumers,and integrating consumer's ideas into product improvement arnd upgrading.In order to strengthen the communication with consumers,some enterprises have built virtual brand communities.The virtual brand communities have changed the status of consumers from passive recipients into participants in the supply chain.In the communities,consumers interact with others,participate in product innovation,and gradually form opinion leaders and ordinary consumers.However,the study of opinion leaders in the virtual brand communities is less.Through opinion leaders,enterprises can communicate and cooperate with consumers more conveniently and cost-effectively,thus creating more product value with consumers.Therefore,this paper mainly identifies the opinion leaders from the virtual brand communities and studies the value co-creation process with opinion leaders.On the basis of related literatures,this paper combined theory with practice,using the method of complex network to build consumer interactive network,andchoosing the individual index with the overall index to identify opinion leaders.The results showed that in the HUAWEI community,the consumer interactive network is loose,and only less consumers are active.When selecting the opinion leaders,it was also found that some nodes had higher in individual indexs,but the overall effect on the network was smaller after removing the node,which means these nodes are on edge position in the network.Therefore,combining the individual index with the overall index to select the opinion leader of the community is more advantageous.Next this paper studied the value co-creation with the opinion leaders and compared with different conditions.Results showed that with the participation of opinion leaders,the expectations of value co-creation between enterprises and consumers are more likely to agree.And enterprises and consumers can co-create more value through regular interaction with opinion leaders.The innovation of this paper mainly-includes:1)this paper collected real data from the HUAWEI community,and build the consumer interaction network.Based on this network,it combined individual index and the overall index to select opinion leaders of virtual brand community.2)this paper used DeGroote model to study value co-creation with opinion leaders and compared with other cases,to provide suggestions for cooperation between enterprises and consumers in the future.