The impact of Online Brand Community on Consumption of Cultural Products: Evidence from China’s Mobile Game Industry

Abstract

An online brand community is a sort of online group formed to interact with customers regarding a specific brand usage and following. Because the online brand community has natural open communication and cohesion based on common brand interests, it plays an essential role in attracting new customers, retaining old customers, promoting brand development, and enhancing brand influence. In that sense, we observe the value of online brand communities centering on physical consumer goods marketing. However, there are very few studies in the field of cultural consumption. This dissertation tries to analyze the relationship between mobile game online brand community characteristics, community commitment, and in-game purchase intention, based on the mobile game industry analysis in China. This study applies the SOR (Stimulus-Organism-Response) model as an overarching framework. It uses 495 survey data for Chinese mobile game players to verify the effect of the Mobile game online brand community characteristics on community commitment and in-game purchase intention. We also consider community type and Perceived community-brand similarity as the moderating variables on the relationships (1) between mobile game online brand community characteristics and community commitment and (2) between community commitment and in-game purchase intention, respectively. Results indicate that the four characteristics of Mobile game online brand community all have a significant positive impact on community commitment, and community commitment has a significant positive impact on in-game purchase intention. The impact of Information benefits and Social interaction benefits in the consumer-initiated community is significantly higher than that of the Company-initiated community, while the impact of Economic benefits and Hedonic benefits in the company-initiated community is slightly higher than that of the consumer-initiated community, but the difference is not significant. Finally, Finally, we also found that Perceived community-brand similarity can positively moderate the effect of community commitment on In-game purchase intention in Company-initiated community. These findings will aid mobile game companies in using online brand communities for game marketing, strengthening customer-game brand relationships, and providing references for online brand community studies on other cultural products.