The Impact of Online Brand Community

The Impact of Online Brand Community Type
on Consumer’s Community Engagement Behaviors:
Consumer-Created vs. Marketer-Created Online Brand
Community in Online Social-Networking Web Sites
Doohwang Lee, Ph.D.,1 Hyuk Soo Kim, M.A.,2 and Jung Kyu Kim, M.A.3
Abstract
The current study proposed and tested a theoretical model of consumers’ online brand community
engagement behaviors, with particular attention given to online brand community type (consumer vs.
marketer-created). By integrating attribution and social identity theories, this study investigated the causal
linkages between intrinsic motives of altruism, social identification motivations, and online brand community engagement behaviors. The results showed that consumers’ online brand community engagement
intentions were indirectly influenced by the different types of communities through different levels of
consumers’ attributions to intrinsic motives of altruism. This study also found that, in the attribution processes, consumers’ intrinsic motives of altruism motivated them to identify themselves socially with the
online communities they join. Finally, this study demonstrated that the intrinsic motives of altruism and
social identification motivations provided strong social incentives to motivate consumers to engage in
subsequent online brand community behaviors.
Introduction
The rapidly growing popularity of online networking Web sites (e.g., Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, socialetc.) has enabled both marketers and consumers to build and
promote consumer–brand relationships through online brand
communities. In such online brand communities, marketers
can facilitate the online brand communities as a versatile
brand-building tool so that they can create, customize, and
distribute persuasive advertising messages for products
and services. At the same time, avid consumers can also build
and manage many successful online brand communities in
which they can lead other members to engage voluntarily in
various community behaviors such as membership intention,
recommendation, active participation, and so forth.1 However, there has been little research on how consumer-created
online brand communities are different from marketercreated online brand communities in terms of the social psychological processes that motivate consumers to participate in
online brand community engagement behaviors.
The present study proposes and tests a model of online
brand community engagement that integrates attribution
theory2 with social identity theory.3 Specifically, this study
posits that two types of online brand communities differentiate the degree to which consumers attribute intrinsic motives of altruism to the two different types of community
creators. In the attribution processes, consumers’ intrinsic
motives of altruism motivate them to identify themselves
socially with the online communities they join. Consequently,
consumers’ intrinsic motives of altruism and social identification motivations are assumed to provide strong social incentives to motivate consumers to engage in subsequent
online brand community behaviors.
Attribution theory and discounting principle
Based on the assumption that human beings are active
perceivers of observable events, attribution theory specifies
the ways in which individuals infer causality of why the
events occur by taking into consideration both internal personal characteristics (intrinsic motives) and external situational characteristics (extrinsic motives) of the events they
perceive.2 Notably, individuals tend to reduce multiple possible attribution situations into a single plausible explanation
1Department of Telecommunication and Film, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
2Department of Advertising and Public Relations, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
3College of Communication and Information Sciences, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
CYBERPSYCHOLOGY, BEHAVIOR, AND SOCIAL NETWORKING
Volume 14, Number 1-2, 2011
ª Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.
DOI: 10.1089/cyber.2009.0397
59
for the events they observe, possibly because consumers tend
to associate rapidly causes with events and generalize across
similar attribution situations.2 Consequently, external factors
can be easily discounted when internal factors are assumed to
explain an event or the other way around.
Past consumer behavior research suggests that consumers tend to attribute corporations’ marketing strategies
to extrinsic motives of profit exploitation and discount
their intrinsic motives of altruism.4,5 For example, Rifon
et al.5 applied attribution theory to corporations’ sponsorship of a health Web site and found that consumers
were more likely to associate the sponsorship to intrinsic
motives of altruism than to extrinsic motives of profit exploitation. The findings suggest that if consumers associate
the sponsorship to intrinsic motives of altruism, they are
more likely to discount the corporation’s self-serving motives of profit exploitation and infer the altruistic motives
of the sponsor.