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Keywords

virtual brand community; social network embedding; UGC quality; value co-creation

Abstract

With the sharing economy sweeping the world, and the rise and popularization of emerging technologies represented by the Internet, the focus of enterprise brand building has begun to change, and more attention has been paid to building a healthy cooperative relationship with consumers, sharing and integrating resources. Therefore, many enterprises have begun to focus on-creating virtual brand communities, that is, online communities built on the Internet platform for brand enthusiasts to interact socially around brands. Users participating in value co-creation in virtual brand communities are both value producers and value receivers. With continuous interaction, they integrate resources such as knowledge, information, and experience to generate information about the brand, product, or service, achieving the goal of co-creation. In the practice of co-creating user value in virtual brand communities, how to improve user participation, maintain the long-term health and sustainable development of the community, and other key issues that community operators urgently need to address. Therefore, as a key element in solving such practical problems and promoting user value co-creation behavior, user social network embedding and user generated content quality are gradually becoming hot research topics. Through literature review, it can be found that although user social network embedding and user generated content quality belong to different dimensions, from the perspective of value creation, network embedding and UGC quality are essentially interdependent. In addition, at the level of research methods, existing studies mainly use traditional research methods such as structural equation modeling to explore the impact of user social network embedding and user generated content quality on user value co-creation behavior. There are few studies that explore the synergistic effect of social network embedding and user generated content quality on user value co-creation behavior. Therefore, in order to explore the driving path of user value co-creation behavior in virtual brand communities, this study adopts a configuration perspective and uses the fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis method (fsQCA) to explore the synergistic effect of five antecedent conditions on user value co-creation behavior in virtual brand communities from two levels: content quality generated by virtual brand community users and social network embedding. Research has found that the quality of user generated content information, the quality of user generated content interaction, structural embedding, cultural embedding, and relationship embedding are not necessary conditions for promoting user value co-creation behavior in virtual brand communities alone. There are three paths that drive user value co-creation behavior in virtual brand communities, namely the ‘ relationship culture driven model’, ‘ structure knowledge driven model’, and ‘network information driven model’. Among them, the ‘relationship culture driven model’ can be further divided into social network embedding driven path, user integration and knowledge driven path, and user integration and interaction driven path; The reasonable matching between user generated content quality and social network embedding plays an important role in promoting value co-creation behavior among users in virtual brand communities. The research conclusion can not only enrich the research system of social network embedding and user generated content quality, but also provide a new perspective for the study of user value co-creation behavior in virtual brand communities, and provide reference for subsequent related research.

DOI

10.16315/j.stm.2024.04.009

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