Understanding how participating behaviours influenced by individual motives affect continued generating behaviours in product-experience-shared communities

ABSTRACT

The characteristics of multiple brands involved and users’ original content, facilitate a brand-new online platform’s emergence, that is, a product-experience-shared community (PESC), being distinguished from the brand community that has been extensively studied. While popular nowadays, PESC still involves limited research. Mainly, why users volunteer to write a flow of content remains unclear. Our purpose is to analyse the effects of different motivational factors on different participation behaviours, which further influence continued generating intention in the PESC context. Employing the theory of Uses and Gratification (U&G) on a sample of 729 users and using Partial Least Squares-Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM), the study deeply identified the participation behaviour into three levels, i.e. content consuming, reacting, and generating, as well as investigated their relations with motives (utilitarian, recreational, cultural and social motives) and continued generating behaviour. The results show that different participation behaviours are relevant to utilitarian, recreational, cultural, and/or social motives. Furthermore, users continued generating intention is affected by their complete satisfaction with their participation experience. This paper also gives theoretical and practical implications.

KEYWORDS:

• Product-experience-shared community
• participation behaviours
• continued generating intention
• satisfaction

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Notes

1 Please note that as our targeted context, i.e. the PESC, is related to brand and purchasing experience, we make use of the terms customers, consumers, users, community members, and platform users interchangeably in this text to describe the subjects who participate in any forms as visitors to the platforms.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 71740017]; MOE Layout Foundation of Humanities and Social Sciences [grant number 20YJA630091].