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Erschienen in:
2016 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel
What Motivate Consumers to Participate in Online Communities: A Critical Review of Extant Knowledge
verfasst von : Weiling Zhuang, Gajana Porosjan, Nayoung Lee
Erschienen in: Let’s Get Engaged! Crossing the Threshold of Marketing’s Engagement Era
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Abstract
The Internet has significantly changed the way how people interact and communicate with each other. The world witnessed the booming success of many social networking sites (SNSs) such as Facebook, Twitter, WeChat, YouTube, Pinterest, QQ, Flickr, and LinkedIn. People participate in the online communities on these SNSs to connect with other users (e.g., friends, family members, strangers), share information (e.g., blogs, photos, videos), and help individuals and organizations with other purposes (e.g., promoting new products, recruiting new members). Online communities refer to the persistent collections of people with common or complementary interests use Internet to interact with each other (Preece 2001).
Despite the consensus of the importance of consumer participation in online community, the literature lacks theoretical review and summary about what motivates consumers to participate in online community. Thus, the present study attempts to fill this gap by (1) reviewing and synthesizing the literature about the drives that are associated with consumer participation in online community, (2) describing what we know and do not know about the antecedents of consumer participation in online community, and (3) developing an agenda for future research to bridge the gaps in our knowledge.
Review of prior studies suggests that consumers participate in online community because of various motives. Our research framework accepts the work made by Etgar (2008) and proposes that consumers engage in online community to achieve various goals. A number of potentially relevant drives include the economic drives, and psychological and social drives. The economic drives include accessibility, time, low cost, usability, and ease of use. The psychological and social drives consist of group identity, attachment and engagement, self-expression, self-fulfillment, and trust. Furthermore, these potential drives are associated with consumer perceived utilitarian value and hedonic value based upon prior literature.
The present study summarizes what is currently known about the drives of consumer participation in online community. Next, we present a research framework that shows the association between these drives and perceived values and participation intention. Researchers may extend prior work in the following areas. First, more work is needed to develop the constructs of various drives. Zeithaml’s (1988) means-end approach to this conceptual development could be one potential way. Second, we can further address questions about the impacts of different consumer online participation drives on consumer online experience after the concepts and measures of these drives have been developed. Third, the impact of different types of contents on online communities needs more attention. Finally, more studies are needed to investigate the input from the firms which own and operate the online communities.