Joining Virtual Brand Communities: Does Every Honeymoon Have Its Hangover?

摘要

During the last decades, the internet has emerged as an important medium for companies to connect with their customers . In opinion polls, a total of 75 percent of social media users state that they regularly connect with brands via Face-book (Marketing Research Institute lab42 2004), in other words: they become members of virtual brand communities (VBCs). Existing marketing research has already generated first evidence pointing to the desirable effects of VBCs for companies' management of customer relationships (Carlson, Sueter, and Brown 2008; Stockburger-Sauer 2010; Zhou et al 2012). However, existing studies are limited in that they only present one-shot pictures of customers' perceptions of VBCs. Indeed, little is known about the dynamic process by which joining a VBC affects the customer company relationship. In support of this claim, many researchers have noted that there is a clear need for research analyzing the dynamic effects of joining and interacting within a VBC (e.g., Bhat-tacharya, Rao, and Glynn 1995; Algesheimer et al. 2010). How could joining a VBC affect the CC relationship and the resulting financial payoffs? The Honeymoon-Hangover-Theory (HHT; Boswell, Boudreau, and Tichy 2005), which is well-established in occupational psychology, offers a promising approach to predict the pattern of changes in identification triggered by the entry into a VBC. Based on the theoretical perspective of HHT, we propose that joining a VBC will lead to an initial exaltation of customers' identification with the company (CCI), which is then followed by an adverse backwash.