消費者參與及虛擬涉入

Abstract

Due to the growing number of Internet users, online interaction environment such as virtual communities and blogs have the power to shape online participants’ attitudes, behaviors, and even their purchasing decisions. In view of ever-increasing influence of virtual interaction environment, this paper intends to examine the determinants of consumer participation and virtual involvement in the context of virtual communities and blogs. The purpose of first essay is to develop a conceptual model of how technology-enabled virtual experiences contribute to community members’ online trust and engagement through inducing their community identification. We also examined the influence of two types of social influences in the virtual community: within-community normative pressure and normative pressure from outside of the community. In this study, we employed the structural equation modeling (SEM) approach to estimate our conceptual model using survey data from participants of the online game community, World of Warcraft (WOW). The results mainly support our hypotheses. We showed that three types of experience could influence community members’ engaging behavior through an increase in community identification and community trust. More importantly, we found that normative pressure from outside of the community exhibits a significant and inverted U-shaped relationship with online community engagement, while within-community normative pressure has a positive relationship with community engagement. No evidence was found to support the inverted U-shaped relationship between within-community normative pressure and community members’ engagement. Theoretical contributions and marketing implications are then provided and discussed.

Electronic publishing and widespread audiences highly interested in a particular subject make blogs a powerful form of word-of-mouth. Consumers often rely on independent input when making consumption decisions, and frequently turn to the blogosphere in search of opinions of those who have come to be highly regarded either, owing to their expertise in a given area or to their charisma. Based on the importance of blog power, the purpose of second essay is to address how blogger creates expert and referent power through blog readers’ participation. In this study, we employed the structural equation modeling (SEM) approach to estimate our conceptual model using Taiwan-based survey data from blog readers. This study obtained 567 completed responses for subsequent analysis after discarding incomplete responses. Theoretical contributions and marketing implications will then provided and discussed.