Abstract
Past studies have generally demonstrated that virtual community building is an effective marketing approach for forging deep and enduring affective bonds with consumers. This study extends previous research by proposing and testing a model that investigates the key mediating processes that underlie the relationship between virtual community participation and consumer loyalty. The authors test their hypothesized model on data obtained from three large online retailing stores. Their results show that virtual community participation significantly enhances customer loyalty both through community identification and through psychological processes (i.e., trust and satisfaction). As consumers identify increasingly with the community, they perceive themselves and the focal community as sharing the same core or defining attributes and see themselves as typical representatives of the group. Moreover, through encouraging virtual community participation, online retailers can gain greater levels of knowledge about consumers’ past purchases, and thereby form an appropriate response to their customers’ desires and needs.
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Keywords
- Community Participation
- Citizenship Behavior
- Intangible Asset
- Virtual Community
- Community Identification
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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© 2015 Academy of Marketing Science
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Pai, PY., Chiou, YL., Tsai, HT. (2015). Facilitating the Development of Firm-Customer Relationships in Online Retailing Contexts Through Virtual Community Cultivation. In: Robinson, Jr., L. (eds) Proceedings of the 2009 Academy of Marketing Science (AMS) Annual Conference. Developments in Marketing Science: Proceedings of the Academy of Marketing Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10864-3_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10864-3_19
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Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-10863-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-10864-3
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