A Study of Shaping Consuming Behavior in Virtual Communities

摘要

Drucker's Post-Capitalist Society claims that different generations represent different value systems, lifestyles and commercial modes [4]. More importantly these generations can be linked into a continual process with distinctive watersheds sitting among. The world today indeed witnesses a new watershed to emerge with the arrival of internet, delivering tremendous impacts on consumer habits. The nature of our selecting commodities is said to have been transformed from the days when we had less time to compare, less access to encounter, and less confidence to judge those commodities that are arduously promoted by the suppliers.rnOn the other hand, however, researches found that internet enterprises are also aware that in virtual communities consumers are in lack of commitment to specific commercial goods they promote as there is a lack of face-to-face or even voice-to-voice interaction to convey certain social meaning as that in the "real" communities. Since stimulus-response relationship cannot be taken for granted and reinforcement has to be in place to ensure engagement, the internet content producers are not hesitant to make effort to construct selection patterns of consumers in some strategic ways. Shaping, delayed effectiveness and conditioning are the main approaches, to name but the most important three.rnSeeing that trends that virtual community is increasingly identified by internet content producers as an important benchmark to potentially influence consuming patterns, this paper is to examine the structure of consumer shaping and consumer delayed effectiveness as a premature effort to explore the current strategy used by the internet content producers that have significant stakes in shaping consumers' virtual community. Methodologically, a triangulation design is set and a benefit chain is constructed, sustained by interviews in a face-to-face and focus-group formats. Based upon the findings after the survey, the paper in the end proposes a model of consumers' delayed effectiveness that not only summaries the developing processrnevolution of delay effectiveness but serves as a reference point for internet enterprises if they are to create a promotion strategy in virtual communities.