Consumers' Product Experience Disclosure on Virtual Brand Community: From the Perspective of Privacy Calculus

Abstract

In the virtual brand community customer disclosures related to product usage experience not only enable the product’s brand company to obtain customer information but also attract potential customers to participate in brand community discussions This research adopted the privacy calculus theory to explore customer usage experience disclosure and to understand the roles that the virtual brand community and customers play in the disclosure process Therefore sense of virtual community and brand community engagement were adopted to discuss customer disclosure emotional elicitation and privacy calculus factors were treated as antecedents of a sense of virtual community and brand community engagement Moreover brand community was also adopted as a moderator in the model The survey focused on members of a virtual brand community and a total of 944 valid questionnaires were collected Structural equation modeling was adopted for the data analyses The results showed that socialization and self-expression increased a sense of virtual community and brand community engagement but pleasing others only positively affected the sense of virtual community Reward and flaming (a hostile and insulting interaction between persons over the Internet) had a significant impact on the sense of virtual community and brand community engagement on the part of customers In addition a high level of brand community engagement and sense of virtual community increased intention toward customer disclosure related to product experience Finally this study suggested that brand community managers should not only provide a two-way communication platform for customers but also need to manage and regulate the use of hostile negative responses In addition some tokens can be provided as a reward to encourage customer willingness toward disclosure of experiences Further managers also can establish a good virtual brand community culture that encourages customers to participate in the discussion and increases engagement rates in their virtual brand communities

Date of Award	2018 Oct 5
Original language	English
Supervisor	Hsin-Hsin Chang (Supervisor)