Enterprises as partners to customers in old days set up the communities based on their own brand, built up the relationship between the brand and customers, and intended the participation of customers. However, the information-oriented society brought...
Enterprises as partners to customers in old days set up the communities based on their own brand, built up the relationship between the brand and customers, and intended the participation of customers. However, the information-oriented society brought the increase of leisure time and growth of mass-media, and the customers positively joined and enjoyed the consumption culture and therefore, the media for the mutual-correlation between customers and customers has been generated in wide variety.
Accordingly, the 'enterprise providing type' brand community established in the internet by the related enterprise with its own brands and the 'customer voluntary type' community have been settled and spreaded. So most enterprises are convinced at the importance and influence of the online brand communities, but in reality do not correspond efficiently to the management and effective use of communities by types against customers' positive engagement. Now it is necessary to analyze in detail and with effect the brand attitudes and parameters of community types with the focus on the brand of interest.
But the existing researches are limited only at exploratory level for the influence on and utility of informations, brand characters and loyalty, and the consciousness of communities and output variables, and do not comprehensively direct the customer-brand relationship in rapid change and online brand communities by the types of enterprises and customers. In other words in reality the theoretical background explaining the updated mutual relationship between customers and brands is not fully developed.
In this paper it is intended to prove the influence by types on the brand attitudes and relationship between parameters in the specific brand community at the online. To do this the community devotion and the community credibility are treated as parameters influencing the brand attitudes, and the mixed qualitative and quantitative values are measured for the community devotion. In addition it is also included to prove the relative influence of community devotion and credibility, to verify the group analysis by mutual interaction of the community devotion and credibility as a supplementary analysis, and finally to show the differences of brand attitudes among groups by parameter.
The result of research analysis indicates the notable differences in brand attitudes in terms of online brand community types, and confirms that the brand attitudes and community devotion and credibility at the customer voluntary type community is affirmatively developed than those of the enterprise providing type community. It is also proven that as parameters of community types the community devotion and the credibility are the important parameters in developing the relation between customers and brands, and this fact is essential to build up the long term relationship. Here the fact that the credibility parameter has larger influence on the brand attitudes than the devotion as the personal characters of correspondents shows the development of credit in the beginning of brand community is more important than the membership or mental affection. In addition in this research the differences of brand attitudes are proved by dividing 4 groups based on the level of community devotion and credibility as supplementary analysis. Among these groups the group with low devotion and low credibility is shown different from other groups, and it is important to induce their participation and gradually enhance their activities by improving their credibility rather than customers' devotion in interest. These facts indicate the necessity of strategy on the brand positioning at the fractionized marketing and diverse market environments according to the level of the devotion and credibility. By doing this ever changing customers' needs is satisfied, and spontaneous online brand community models will be constructed through the development of relationship as brand partners.