Electronic Word-of-Mouth in B2C Virtual Communities:An Empirical Study from ctrip.com

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 한국마케팅과학회
· 수록지 정보 : Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science(마케팅과학연구) / 20권 / 3호 / 262 ~ 268페이지
· 저자명 : Guoxin Li, Statia Elliot, Chris Choi

초록

Virtual communities (VC) has developed quickly in that more and more people have participated in virtual communities to exchange information and opinion. A virtual community is a group of people who may or may not meet one another face to face, and who exchange words and ideas through the mediation of computer bulletin boards and networks. A Business-to-Consumer virtual community (B2CVC) is a commercial virtual community that creates a trustworthy environment intended to motivate consumers to be more willing to buy from an online shop. B2CVCs create a social atmosphere through information contribution such as recommendations, reviews, ratings of buyers and sellers. Although the importance of B2C virtual communities has been recognized, few studies have been conducted to examine members’ word-of-mouth behavior within these communities.
This study proposes a model of involvement, statistics, trust, stickiness and word-of-mouth in a B2C virtual community, and explores the relationships between these elements based on empirical data. The objectives are three-fold: (i) to empirically test a B2C virtual community model that integrates measures of beliefs, attitudes and behaviors; (ii) to better understand the nature of these relationships specifically on word-of-mouth as a measure of revenue-generation; and, (iii) to better understand the role of stickiness of B2C virtual community in CRM marketing.
The model incorporates three key elements: (i) the beliefs of community members, measured in terms of their involvement assessment; (ii) the attitudes of community members, measured in terms of their satisfaction and trust; and, (iii) the behavior of community members, measured in terms of site stickiness, and members’ word-of-mouth. Involvement has been seen as the motivation for consumers to participate in a virtual community. For B2CVC members, information searching and posting have been proposed as the main purpose for their involvement. Satisfaction has been reviewed as an important indicator of a member’s overall community evaluation, and conceptualized by different levels of member interactions with their VC. The formation and expansion of a VC depends on the willingness of members to share information and services. Researchers have found that trust is a core component facilitating the anonymous interaction in VCs and e-commerce, and therefore trust building in VCs has been a common research topic. It is clear that the success of a B2C virtual community depends on the stickiness of members to enhance purchasing potential. Opinions communicated and information exchanged between members of a B2CVC may represent a type of written word-of-mouth (WOM). Therefore, word-of-mouth is one of the primary factors driving the diffusion of B2CVCs across the Internet. The research model and hypotheses are presented in figure 1.


Fig. 1: A model of stickiness and e-word-of-mouth in B2CVC The model was tested through the implementation of an online survey of CTrip travel virtual community members. A total of 243 questionnaires were collected, and reduced to 204 through an empirical process of data cleaning. The study’s hypotheses examine the extent to which involvement, satisfaction and trust influence B2CVC stickiness and members’ word-of-mouth. We used Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to test hypotheses in our analysis. The structural model fit indices were within accepted thresholds: χ2/df was 2.76, NFI was .904, IFI was .931, CFI was .930, and RMSEA was .017. Results indicate that involvement has significant influence on Satisfaction (p<0.001, β=0.809). The proportion of variance in Satisfaction that is explained by members’ involvement is over half (Adjusted R2=0.654), reflecting a strong association. The effect of Involvement on Trust is also statistically significant (p<0.001, β=0.751), with 57 percent of the variance in Trust explained by Involvement (Adjusted R2=0.563). When the construct Stickiness is treated as one of dependent variables, the proportion of variance explained by the variables of Trust and Satisfaction is relatively low (Adjusted R2=0.331). Satisfaction does have a significant influence on Stickiness, with β=0.514. However, out of the expectation, the influence of Trust on Stickiness is not even significant (p=0.231, t=1.197), rejecting the proposed hypothesis. The importance of Stickiness in the model is more significant as it has effect on e-Word-of-mouth with β=.920 (p<0.001). Here, the measures of Stickiness explain over eighty of the variance in e-Word-of-mouth (Adjusted R2=0.846). Overall, the results of the study support the hypothesized relationships between a member’s involvement and both their satisfaction with, and trust of, the B2CVC. However, trust, as a traditional measure in behavioral models, has no significant influence on stickiness in the B2CVC environment.
This study contributes to the growing body of literature on business-to-consumer virtual communities, specifically addressing gaps in the academic research to date by integrating measures of beliefs, attitudes and behaviors in one model. The results provide additional insights to behavioral factors in a B2CVC environment, helping to sort out relationships between traditional measures, and relatively new measures. For practitioners, the identification of factors such as member involvement, that strongly influence B2CVC member satisfaction, can help to focus technological resources in key areas. Global e-marketers can develop marketing strategies directly targeting B2CVC members. Such as for global tourism business, marketers can target Chinese members of a B2CVC by providing special discounts for active community members or developing early adopter programs to encourage stickiness in the community. Future studies are called for, and more sophisticated modeling, to expand the measurement of B2CVC member behavior, and to conduct experiments across industries, communities and cultures.

참고자료

· 없음