The Study of Brand Community Members' Behaviors from Two Perspectives of Group and Individual Influences

• Main Authors: Yu-Ping Wu, 吳鈺萍
• Other Authors: Wen-Hai Chih
• Format: Others
• Published: 2016
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/3mq5zc

博士 === 國立東華大學 === 企業管理學系 === 104 === This study aims to discuss the interactions among brand community users in different dimensions. In accordance with the use and gratification theory of Katz, Blumler and Gurevitch (1973), it divided motivation into two layers—group and individual—to explore the relationships among Apple brand users’ attachment, imitation other, brand commitment, inertia, subsequent purchases, knowledge sharing behavior, and brand advocacy. The empirical results showed that attachment, imitation other, and inertia were key factors for community users to create brand value co-creators behavior. Moreover, this study presented three rival models to compare with the proposed model. According to the comparisons among hypotheses, R2 (variance of consequences explained by antecedents), and model fit, the proposed model was the most appropriate for the reason of simplicity and parsimony. Based on the social identity theory and the similarity-attraction paradigm, this study took identity-based attachment and bond-based attachment as the mediators to investigate the influence of Apple brand community users on imitation other in terms of brand image, perceived diagnosticity, and entertainment. The results showed that identity-based attachment and bond-based attachment were important mediators and the effects of brand image, perceived diagnosticity, and entertainment on imitation other were stronger than the direct effects of brand image, perceived diagnosticity, and entertainment on imitation other. This indicates the importance of dual-path behavior.