Antecedents and consequences of virtual brand community participation

Despite the fact that virtual brand communities (VBC) have existed for over 25 years, little scholarly research has addressed the reasons why people join VBC or choose to remain a patron of one. Also, there is a dearth of study that exploring the effect of VBC participation towards the brand trust and commitment. In view of these shortcomings, this paper is reviewing the previous literature and aims to propose a framework which forms the antecedents and consequences of VBC participation. Two broad motivations (intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation) are proposed as antecedents of participation and two broad outcomes (community consequences and brand consequences) are proposed as consequences of participation. Since this paper is intended to focus on conceptual issues, a possible limitation is that an empirical discussion of this subject matter lies outside the scope of this paper