Effect of Online Brand Community on Customer Behavior Exploration: Reconciling Mixed Findings via Regulatory Focus Theory

This study seeks to address the mixed findings of prior studies regarding the effect of online brand community on customer behavior. Based on the regulatory focus theory, we hypothesize that participation in a brand community tends to increase both visit and purchase frequencies of customers with promotion-focus; on the contrary, the same would typically decrease visit and purchase frequencies of customers with prevention-focus. By analyzing data from an online brand community using a “propensity-score matching” technique, we found a partial validation that attendance of the community led to increases in customer visit frequency for customers with both promotion-focus and prevention-focus. Further, our results show that customers with promotion-focus tend to purchase more; while customers with prevention-focus slightly decreased their purchase volume. Both theoretical and practical implications of our findings are discussed in the paper