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Keywords

virtual community, value co-creation behavior, personal-environment matching, co-creating results

Abstract

With the prominent role of virtual brand communities in achieving value co-creation between enterprises and users, systematically sorting out the core factors that affect user participation in value co-creation and improving the effectiveness of value co-creation has become a core issue that enterprises need to solve. Many current studies have focused on the importance of user-enterprise interaction and have examined in detail the impact of cognitive and affective elements such as personal characteristics, social capital, equity climate and trust commitment on value co-creation. However, current research has mostly emphasized the importance of user needs and value perceptions, and has not paid enough attention to the complexity that users may bring as external operative resources. Differences in the values pursued by enterprises and users in virtual communities, and the resulting differences in matching user needs with community supply aspects of community operations, may have a significant impact on value co-creation behavior and require further research. Therefore, based on the personal-environmental matching theory, this paper compares the matching elements between users and enterprises in the virtual community context from the perspective of consistent matching and complementary matching as the antecedent, and draws on the " motivation-behavior-outcome" framework of self-determination theory to develop an integrated pathway model from matching elements to two types of value co-creation and corresponding value co-creation outcomes between users and communities, in order to focus on the impact of matching elements on spontaneous and participatory value co-creation and the difference in co-creation effects, and test the conceptual model with the help of 311 valid questionnaire data. The research results show that the two types of matching elements are positive for two value co-creation behaviors, in which the complementary matching of capabilities, needs and roles is more influential than consistent matching. The user's spontaneous value co-creation behavior positively affects brand equity and customer value, and the mediating effect is obvious from the two types of matching elements to the two types of co-creation results; however, the value cocreation of user participation does not affect the company’s brand equity. Obviously, it only plays an intermediary role in the path of complementarity and consistency matching customer value. The combination of personal-environmental matching theory, self-determination theory and value co-creation theory in the context of virtual brand communities can provide new research perspectives on customer participation in value co-creation in virtual brand communities; the analysis of the differentiated influence paths of different co-creation behaviors can help understand the formation mechanism of customer participation in value co-creation in more detail, and can provide corresponding references for virtual communities to achieve two-way matching between enterprises and users to achieve better cocreation results. At the same time, the paper expands the research perspective on the process and outcome of user value co-creation behavior in virtual communities, providing a basis for further refinement of online consumer behavior in the online community environment, and can also provide a certain theoretical basis and empirical reference for virtual community operation and user management.

DOI

10.16315/j.stm.2023.03.001

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