| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中正大學 === 行銷管理研究所 === 100 === As mentioned in C.K. Prahalad’s book “The Future of Competition”, more and more business activities are through consumer involvement and co-create values with consumers. How to operate user communities and create more value through the panel has become an important issue for companies in recent years. This study discussed how user community can benefit companies and what the connection is among the benefit type, product features and user characteristics.
This research collected and analyzed seventeen cases of user community operations to categorize the benefits, product features and user characteristics. Besides, it inducted the connections among different companies with different characteristics which have benefited through operating user communities. The results are as follows:
1. When companies offer products with high complexity, they can let users teach each other through the communities and thus decrease the cost of service.
2. When users have high product involvement, companies can choose some advocators with strong influence from the communities and use them to create positive word-of-mouth and thus, influence others in the communities.
3. When users’ needs are not easy to discover, companies can gain more customer insight through the communities and thus understand more about users’ behaviors and needs.
4. When users are high-involved in certain products and service which are able to be modify by users, companies can co-create values with uses by giving them rights to modify and design the products or service.
5. When companies offer experience goods and search goods, they can let users share their experience with these products in the communities to decrease the cost of searching and uncertainty for other users.
6. When there are strong social attributes in the products and service, companies can increase the interaction among users through the communities and thus, increase the social value for users who use those products and service.
This research focused on the connection between company characteristics and user community operation to give practical suggestions for companies which intend to operate and benefit from user communities.
Keywords: User Community, Value Co-creation
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