The Effects of Interactivity, Experiential Value and Participation on Web Brand Loyalty

Majority of researches about brands mainly focus on customer goods settings and service settings in offline environment. For a better understanding of emerging web brands, this study investigates the role of interactivity, experiential value and participation in the process of web brand building. In this study, we choose virtual community business as a representative for web business (brand) in China. Out of 460 chinese users surveyed, 422 responses were adopted for the analysis. The research results show that interactivity affects web brand loyalty through brand experiential value, satisfaction and web brand attitude. It is interesting that interactivity affects brand experiential value rather than satisfaction and brand experiential value plays an important role by mediating the effect of perceived interactivity on satisfaction. Web brand managers need to try to explore different experiential strategies to enhance brand experience. The role of customer participation on the effects of satisfaction and those of web brand attitude on web brand loyalty is also explored. The research results show that customer participation moderates the effects of satisfaction and web brand attitude on web brand loyalty. Interestingly enough, the impacts of satisfaction and brand attitude on brand loyalty decrease with the increasing level of participation. In other words, satisfaction and web brand attitude better predict web brand loyalty for lurkers (passive participation) than posters (active participation). Hence, participation need to be included for marketing strategies based on web brand loyalty and its predictors.