With the prevalence of online shopping malls, B2C(business-to-consumer) two-way communication has become viable. Consumers who pursue value consumption have had significant influences on purchase as they freely and extensively upload reviews and messa...
With the prevalence of online shopping malls, B2C(business-to-consumer) two-way communication has become viable. Consumers who pursue value consumption have had significant influences on purchase as they freely and extensively upload reviews and messages regarding their experiences on the internet shopping malls through online community activities.
Consequently, businesses are increasingly interested in online communities and lots of relevant academic research efforts have been made. Unfortunately, studies on specification of product information by considering the characteristics of consumers who think much of value consumption have been limitedly conducted. Also, many researchers have emphasized the relationship quality involving credibility, satisfaction and commitment, but studies that have demonstrated relationship performances in line with consumers mainly rely on commitment or credibility as variables. Particularly, as consumers as well as businesses can pro-actively open online communities, in the field of clothing and textiles, very few comparative study efforts have been made on the influence of communities depending on the hosts who open the online fashion communities. Therefore, this study is to find out the effects of the information characteristics of online fashion communities on the relationship quality and word of mouth including the three dimension of trust-satisfaction-commitment, and analyze how the classification of online communities based on hosts makes difference in forming relationship quality.
In this study, cosmetic products were selected as fashion products because cosmetics were found to have much higher information reference rates on the internet among consumers compared to apparel in the field of fashion products. In addition, as for online communities selected for the purpose of this study, among the online communities chosen as power beauty blogs based on the number of members and consumer opinions, Laneige opened by the company and Glass Mirror by consumers were picked out. Data were collected with a total of 245 members from both communities(79 and 166, respectively) and analyzed with AMOS 6.0. For hypothesis testing, the study model was set with a structural equation modelling to examine the goodness of fit.
The present study has gained the following results:
1. The overall model presented in this study of online fashion communities' word-of-mouth effects showed a favorable goodness of fit. According to the index of goodness of fit of the model presented, the model theoretically suggested in this study regarding the process of building information characteristics, consumer-community relationship quality and word of mouth in online fashion communities was empirically verified. Also, as a result of comparing the goodness of fit between the study model and the alternative model, the model studied here was found superior.
2. The consensus of information in online beauty communities was found to have a negative relation with consumer-community relationship quality, while the information vividness and interactivity were found to have a positive relation with consumer-community relationship quality. This indicates that part-time reply workers' comments and other unsympathetic writings cannot give unconditional credibility or satisfaction. By contrast, comments or writings that awake empathy over a certain information or experience with recency and swift response speed among members resulted in consumers' credibility, satisfaction and commitment within online fashion communities. As such, online fashion shopping malls may as well provide some financial benefits for consumers to upload product information along with pictures and videos or facilitate regular meetings or communication among members rather than artificially offer commercial messages.
3. It was found that the higher the consumer-community relationship quality is, the more actively they accept and spread word of mouth. Thus, online fashion shopping malls would best do take advantage of consumers' frank, live and vivid information and active interaction among members in online communities.
4. Depending on the types of online fashion communities, consumer- community relationship quality showed significant differences. In other words, the consumer-oriented community, compared to business-centered one, was found to have higher relationship quality. In that sense, fashion companies would do well to enhance strategies to take advantage of positive responses from consumer-based online communities let alone from the ones of their own running.