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Customers' continuous value creation (e.g. voice) is an important research issue for the success of brand virtual community (BVC) and new product development, while it is rarely studied from a firm perspective. The purpose of the present study is to investigate how firm attributes exert influences on continuous voice intention in brand virtual communities.

The data were collected through a survey in mobile brand virtual communities in China, and 291 valid responses for data analysis were included to test the research model by using partial least squares (PLSs).

The results show that intrinsic motivation to voice is positively associated with continuous voice intention. Furthermore, the impact of brand identification on intrinsic motivation is found to be fully mediated by community identification. Customer orientation has a positive effect on perceived openness, and both customer orientation and perceived openness positively affect customers' brand identification and community identification.

Although prior studies have examined some variables relevant to voice behavior, few studies have recognized the influence of firm attributes toward the BVC on sustained voice intention. To fill this research gap, the authors propose a research model to shed light on the role of firm attributes by classifying them into brand- vs community-based firm attributes, which affect intrinsic motivation through two types of social identification, namely brand identification and community identification.

When consumers help other users of the same brand, both the brand and consumers benefit. To determine when consumer‐to‐consumer helping behaviors occur and to help managers encourage this value‐creating activity, this paper aims to investigate relationships between social identification and helping behavior intentions within a consumption community and its subgroups.

Surveys were given to consumers identified as members of a consumption community during an annual consumption event. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling.

Consumers' identification with the overall community was positively related to helping behavior intentions toward the overall community, but not subgroup level. Subgroup identification was positively related to helping at the subgroup but negatively related to helping behavior intentions at the community level. When consumers identify with the overall community, they assist other consumers. However, consumers are less likely to help consumers in the overall community when identifying with a subgroup.

When consumers identify with a consumption community and its subgroups, their identification can lead to helping between members. Voluntary helping between consumers provides value to consumers and contributes to the firm's value‐creation process. This study helps managers understand how consumption community development simultaneously encourages and discourages consumer value‐creation through helping behaviors.

This study examines consumer value‐creation through the context of consumer helping intentions within consumption communities on a continuum, as opposed to the dichotomy implied by prior research. This study empirically demonstrates how consumers' membership in subgroups can motivate consumers to help some, but not other consumption community members.

In an era where companies shift a part of their marketing budget to support their social media presence, very little is known about the antecedents and effects of participant identification in a social media community. This paper aims to examine the antecedents of community identification in a Facebook company-managed brand community, for inactive members, using the uses and gratification theory. Brand community identification is also expected to lead to higher levels of brand loyalty for these members.

This research reports the results of a quantitative with survey data from 389 members of a variety of different official Facebook pages.

The results reveal that inactive members of Facebook pages can be influenced to act in a way that is beneficial for a company. Perceived human and information value of the brand Facebook page lead members to identify with a brand community and identification is a strong predictor of loyalty to the brand.

This paper provides suggestions to managers on the development of brand community value that can increase brand community identification and loyalty of apparently inactive brand community members.

By showing that brand community identification and loyalty exist for users with low activity levels, this research challenges the widely accepted idea that only highly active members are valuable in online brand communities. Specifically, it reveals the most important motivations for these members to identify with the community and be loyal to the brand.

With the remarkable advancements in information and communication technologies, comprehending online sport fan communities is being pushed further up in the agenda of sport teams worldwide. Based on social identity theory, the main purpose of this research paper is to test the mechanism of how horizontal relationships developed through online communities lead to vertical relationships such as team identification and behavioural intentions.

Using a sample of online baseball fan community members in South Korea (N = 400) and employing structural equations modelling, the current research examined the structural relations among online community identification, team identification, behavioural intention and WOM intention while testing moderating effect of perceived authenticity.

This study finds that online community identification has a significant positive impact on team-level consumer outcomes: team identification, behavioural intention and WOM intention. Team identification is verified as a significant determinant of both behavioural intention and WOM intention. Moreover, the partial mediating role of team identification in the relationships between online community identification and behavioural intentions are corroborated.

The present study furnishes essential information for identifying the underlying mechanism of how fan-to-fan horizontal relationships cultivate team-to-fan vertical relationships in the context of the virtual fan community.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate empirically the relative emphasis accorded by members of a brand community to identification with that community and identification with the brand‐owner, and thereby close a gap in the literature to date.

Based on a review of the literature relating to identification, loyalty, and potentially mediating brand‐related constructs, a cross‐sectional questionnaire‐based survey was carried out at a brandfest organised by a major European motorcycle manufacturer. Data collected from 256 respondents were analysed by structural equation modelling, testing seven hypothesised causal links.

Brand loyalty is primarily influenced by identification with the brand community, through the mediating role of brand affect.

The findings require confirmation in other settings and industry sectors before they can be generalised with confidence, but point to several fruitful research directions.

Brand strategists have new evidence to guide allocation of effort and resources to the effective cultivation and maintenance of brand loyalty.

The study makes an original contribution, in a real‐world setting, to the understanding of how members of a brand community relate to the brand, and of how their brand loyalty is activated.

Many enterprises recognize that social media is a valuable source of information propagation for brands. Using the self-congruity and social identity theories as theoretical bases, the purpose of this paper is to develop an integrated conceptual model and explore the effects of brand-evangelism-related behavioral decisions of enterprises on virtual community members.

This study targeted community members who had purchased a specific cosmetic brand’s products and had been members of an official brand fan page for at least one year. Using a survey of 488 valid samples and structural equation modeling was used to conduct path analyses.

The results indicated that seven hypothetical paths were supported and exhibited desirable goodness of fit. Value congruity can be used to explain effects of dual identification on various relationships. Relationships among variables of brand evangelism are not independent. Specifically, the effect of brand purchase intentions on positive brand referrals is higher than that on oppositional brand referrals.

The findings can help brand community managers to adopt innovative and effective strategies to gain community members’ identification and maintain a desirable relationship between business and community members. In addition, this study should help marketers to increase the opportunity of maximizing the brand evangelism effect.

This study contributes to the understanding for multiple perspectives of value congruity and adopts the extension viewpoint to understand community members not only have brand value and self-congruity problems but also have community membership goals and values related to the fit problem.

The purpose of this study is to contribute to a better understanding of the antecedents and consequences of loyalty to consumer networks hosted by companies in the scope of social networking sites (SNS). These company social networks (CSNs) have traditionally been studied as online brand communities but more research is needed to understand their role for host companies.

This study identifies CSN performance dimensions (host reputation, informativeness, communication self-expressiveness, rewarding activity and consumption support) and analyzes how they influence attitudes and behavioral intentions toward CSNs (identification with the community, satisfaction and loyalty) and toward the host company (satisfaction and loyalty). A conceptual model is tested through a survey administered to members of a large grocery retailer CSN on Facebook.

Results show that all six identified performance dimensions significantly impact CSN loyalty. However, while self-expressiveness, communication and rewarding activity (which are closely related to social and hedonic value) are predictors of loyalty to the CSN, through the mediation of identification with the community, they neither indirectly (through the mediation of identification) nor directly impact satisfaction with the host. Conversely, informativeness, communication and host reputation are good predictors of loyalty to the CSN, through mediation of satisfaction with the CSN, and also exert an indirect positive influence on satisfaction with the host. Finally, consumption support positively influences loyalty to the CSN through the mediation of identification with the community and directly positively influences satisfaction with the host company.

These results reveal the dichotomous nature of CSNs, as communities of people with shared interests and supplementary services created by companies to add value to their core offering. While perceptions regarding the community facet are independent from attitude toward the host, perceptions regarding supplementary service are significant predictors of satisfaction with the host. These results offer implications for future research and management of companies’ social media presence.

Companies are now using social network sites (SNSs) within their marketing and brand-building activities. Twitter is the preferred SNS for creating brand communities, which offer companies many advantages. The purpose of this paper is to examine how individuals manage their competing needs for being affiliated (operationalized as personal and communal-brand connections) and for being seen as distinctive (operationalized as need for uniqueness (NFU)) when they are members of brand communities on Twitter. The authors have also analysed which type of brand community is able to achieve the balance between both needs, enhancing identification with the brand community.

A total of 318 valid responses were collected from three camera brand communities on Twitter. Messages (“tweets”) which included a link to an online questionnaire were sent to community members via Twitter. The authors examine the proposed model using structural equation modelling.

The authors demonstrate that consumers can satisfy their need for affiliation in brand communities created in Twitter. However, consumers can only reach a balance between the need for affiliation and the need for distinctiveness in brand communities built around niche brands. In contrast, the two needs work in opposition to shape identification in brand communities of big brands.

Optimal distinctiveness theory is used as a theoretical background for proposing how the antecedents of identification with the brand community enhance brand loyalty, with reference to the conflict between the individual’s needs for both distinctiveness and affiliation. Consumers’ identification with the brand community is proposed as a mediator to achieve brand loyalty in brand communities. Consumers reach this balance in brand communities built around a niche brand, where individuals with high NFU feel a high identification with the brand community. For big brands, as consumers’ NFU increases, their identification with the brand community and brand loyalty decreases.

There is limited research examining social drivers and mediators of online brand community identification in the context of business models development. This study aims to identify them behind the social mechanisms and present essential factors which should be applied in business models to foster value co-creation.

Data were collected from a convenience sample of 712 cases gathered among young European Facebook users via an electronic survey and analyzed using the structural equation modeling method.

Customer–other customers’ identification is a pivotal factor in influencing brand community identification.

If companies want to implement online brand communities into business models effectively and co-create brand value, they need deliver brand content useful for customer self-expression and social interaction to enhance consumer-brand identification and customer–customer social bonds which enable to transform the audience into a community. Focusing on the constant reinforcement of online brand community by supporting customer–customer relationships is critical for voluntary value co-creation.

The main contribution of this study to the literature on online brand communities is the presentation and empirical verification of pivotal social mechanisms of online brand community identification considered as a starting point to potential co-creation and capturing value based on the social presence theory.

A brand community consists of relationships between a brand and consumers; community members’ identification with the brand community is a central characteristic of the community. This study aims to provide a comprehensive conceptual framework to investigate how and why such identification-based relationships yield firm- and member-level benefits to participants in the brand community.

This cross-sectional study analyzes data collected through a questionnaire survey of members from the brand community of VW-Golf Club members in Taiwan. The researchers attended the annual meeting of club members and handed out questionnaires directly to the members. The degree centrality of each member was calculated using UCINET 6 for Windows, a social network analysis software application. This study adopts the partial least squares program to evaluate the measurement properties and structural relationships specified in the research model.

The findings suggest that when customers’ identification with a brand community becomes salient, they strengthen their emotional attachment to the brand and improve their centrality in the network. Consequently, emotional attachment can serve as a guiding principle in decision-making and thus strengthen brand equity and assessment of brand extensions. Central members will also gain greater benefits, including collaborative opportunities and influence, through their advantageous position in the network.

This study makes four main contributions to the brand community literature. First, this is the first empirical study to simultaneously examine the relationships among community identification (customer to community), emotional attachment to the brand (customer to brand) and network centrality (customer to customer). Second, the empirical framework depicts dual value-creation routes that explain how identification-based relationships can yield firm- and member-level benefits. With respect to firm-level benefits, this is the first empirical study to examine the brand equity and assessment of brand extension in the brand community research. Third, this study applies the rarely adopted UCINET 6 software to scrutinize the network data from the brand community. Finally, this paper examines three actions that organizations can leverage to enhance consumer identification with a brand community.