브랜드 커뮤니티의 지원 서비스가 커뮤니티 강화요인, 커뮤니티 충성도 및 기업브랜드 충성도에 미치는 영향: 온라인 음악 브랜드 커뮤니티를 중심으로

Abstract

Recently, as internet technology developed enormously, customers are doing brand community activities more online than they are doing offline. As companies are getting more interested in two-way brand marketing that can interact with customers rather than one-way brand marketing, plenty of online brand communities are operated or controlled by companies. For example, music brand communities such as Melon, Dosirak, and MusicOn are supported by telecom companies such as SK Telecom, KTF, and LG Telecom. The companies trying to increase brand loyalty and brand value through brand communities want to find out the way of building and operating brand community effectively. As the customers are doing more brand community activities, the relationship among supporting services, markers of brand communities, community loyalty and company brand loyalty need to be studied. This research empirically examined the effect of the supporting services of brand communities on the markers of communities, community loyalty and company brand loyalty. We developed research model and hypotheses based on extensive literature review and applied them to the example of online music communities. After having conducted empirical study, three major findings that can have both theoretical and managerial implications were discovered. First, customers’ satisfaction level of supporting services (transaction, interest, fantasy, and relationship) by company through brand communities have a positive impact on the markers of brand community (consciousness of kind, rituals and traditions, moral responsibility). Especially, consistent with the study of Armstrong and Hagel (1996) which shows that all of the supporting services have significant impact on the markers of brand communities, companies should provide comprehensive supporting services rather than providing one or two particular supporting services to the customers. The result of this study shows that interest and fantasy have stronger impacts than other supporting services such as transaction and relationship. For the case of Apple i-Tunes, it has more than 70% of market share in American markets while it has only 10% of market share in Korean market. This is because Apple provides wide range of services in American market and only transaction service in Korean market. Second, the greater markers of brand community are, the greater customers show the loyalty towards brand communities. All of the markers of brand communities (consciousness of kind, rituals and traditions, moral responsibility) are statistically significant with the loyalty towards brand communities, and of the markers of brand community, consciousness of kind has strongest impact on customer loyalty towards brand community. This result is consistent with the result of Muniz and O’Guinn (2001)’s study. This result can be viewed as the reflection of unique online environment and self-centered social structure. Because rituals and traditions weakens due to the online environment and moral responsibility weakens due to the self-centered social structure. This result emphasizes that community supporting services have to be developed and provided in the way of improving consciousness of kind in the future. Third, most importantly, supporting services of brand community has positive impacts on community loyalty(e.g., Melon), and even on the loyalty towards the company (e.g., SK Telecom) supporting brand community. This result implies that building and running successful brand community are critical for companies to build brand loyalty. This research has managerial implications as well as theoretical implications. Theoretically, this research comprehensively studied markers of brand community and loyalty towards the brand community, which were only partially studied in previous researches. Furthermore, the most important part of this research is that the community loyalty can transfer to the brand loyalty, which has not been discovered in any previous research. For example, the loyalty towards the Melon online community can transfer to the loyalty of SK telecom running Melon community. Managerially, as customers are getting used to online environment and even many of them are feeling more comfortable online, online community is very important for entertainment business. Under this situation, this research proposes the way of building global competitive advantages through online community to business in Korea.