Role of brand engagement and co-creation experience in online brand community continuance: A service-dominant logic perspective

Abstract

Value creation and acquisition are pivotal for continuous participation in online communities and thus have become goals that brand companies strive to develop in online brand communities (OBCs). Prior studies, however, predominately adopted the goods-dominant logic to assess the role of OBC members’ value perceptions in their value experiences. Such an approach overlooks the fact that one's value experiences in OBCs manifest in the co-creation with the brand and with other OBC members, benefiting from technology platforms and one's community motives. We thus draw on the service-dominant logic to formulate a research model with seven research hypotheses. These hypotheses depict relationships among five research constructs, in which (1) OBC continuance intention serves as the ultimate dependent variable, (2) brand engagement and co-creation experience represent OBC members’ value experiences in consumer-to-brand and consumer-to-consumer interactions, respectively, and (3) social media affordances and members’ OBC identification serve as the antecedents of OBC members’ value experiences. We used the Amazon MTurk platform to collect 246 valid samples worldwide that represent general OBC members. We adopted PLS-SEM to assess the measurement model and test the proposed hypotheses. Our findings indicate that co-creation experience and brand engagement are pivotal value experiences that can increase OBC continuance intention. In addition, social media affordances and OBC identification are instrumental to both value experiences through their facilitation of technology-mediated and communal interactions for resource integration and service exchange among OBC members and the brand. This study sheds light on OBC research by identifying the central role of brand engagement and co-creation experience in OBC continuance. We also discuss theoretical and practical implications and provide future research suggestions.