The popularity of communities on the internet has captured the attention of marketing scholars and practitioners. By adapting to the culture of the internet, however, and providing consumer with the ability to interact with one another in addition to the company, businesses can build new and deeper relationships with customers.
The economic potential of online communities has been discussed with much hope in the many popular papers. In contrast to this enthusiastic prognostications, empirical and practical evidence regarding the economic potential of the online community has shown a little different conclusion. To date, even communities with high levels of membership and vibrant social arenas have failed to build financial viability.
In this perspective, this study investigates the role of various kinds of influencing factors to online community loyalty and basically suggests the framework that explains the process of building purchase loyalty. Even though the importance of building loyalty in an online environment has been emphasized from the marketing theorists and practitioners, there is no sufficient research conclusion about what is the process of building purchase loyalty and the most powerful factors that influence to it.
In the study, the process of building purchase loyalty is divided into three levels, characteristics of community site such as content superiority, site vividness, navigation easiness, and customerization, the mediating variables such as self congruency, consumer experience, and consumer to consumer interactivity, and finally various factors about online community loyalty such as visit loyalty, affect, trust, and purchase loyalty are those things.
And the findings of this research are as follows. First, consumer-to consumer interactivity is an important factor to online community purchase loyalty and other loyalty factors. This means, in order to interact with other people more actively, many participants in online community have the willingness to buy some kinds of p개ducts such as music, content, avatar, and etc. From this perspective, marketers of online community have to create some online environments in order that consumers can easily interact with other consumers and m맏 some site environments in order that consumer can feel experience in this site is interesting and self congruency is higher that at other community sites.
It has been argued that giving consumers a good experience is vital in cyber space, and websites create an active (rather than passive) customer by their nature. Some researchers have tried to pin down the positive experience, with limited success and less empirical support. Web sites can provide a cognitively stimulating experience for the user. We define the online community experience as playfulness based on the past studies. Playfulness is created by the excitement generated through a website's content and measured using three descriptors.
Marketers can promote using and visiting online communities, which deliver a superior web experience, to influence their customers' attitudes and actions, encouraging high involvement with those communities Specially, we suggest that transcendent customer experiences(TCEs) which have aspects of flow and/or peak experience, can generate lasting shifts in beliefs and attitudes including subjective self-transformation and facilitate strong consumer's ties to a online community. And we find that website success is closely related to positive website experiences consumers will spend more time on the site, interacting with other users.
As we can see figure 2, visit loyalty and consumer affect toward the online community site didn't directly influence to purchase loyalty. This implies that there may be a little different situations here in online community site compared to online shopping mall studies that show close relations between revisit intention and purchase intention. There are so many alternative sites on web, consu