온라인 브랜드 커뮤니티 내 리뷰어의 내적속성과 사회적 지지에 따른 정보행동에 관한 연구

As a consequence of enhanced importance of brand, it has been understood as one of intangible assets which creates value for corporations and strategic trend in business management has been changed with brand value as the core. Online brand community is an interactive place in which the relationship between consumers and brand is created and developed, and accordingly it is the place which people share interests and experiences and interaction is found in. Online brand community can form an important role which maintains a long-term relationship between brand and consumers efficiently by continuing culture and history of brand, sharing information and providing social supports. On that score constructing and creating strong online brand community is meant to understand more closely a reviewer’s personal traits and their informative behaviors. The purpose of this study is to more fully investigate the effects of personal traits (self enhancement and public self-consciousness) and social supports(emotional support and informational support) on a reviewer’s informative behaviors (information generation and information transmission) in online brand community. This study uses a questionnaire to collect data, and the structural equation model analysis to analyze the relationships among the research constructs. The results of this study are as follows. First, two kinds of a reviewer’s internal traits, self enhancement and public self-consciousness are positively correlated with information generation and information transmission. Both personal traits, particularly, have the greater effects on information generation than information transmission. In addition, self enhancement is proved to be a more influential factor than public self-consciousness in boosting a reviewer’s informative behaviors. Second, in the perspective of the effects of emotional support and informational support all significantly modify a reviewer’s informative behaviors. In detail, the higher emotional support or informational support a reviewer with strong public self-consciousness perceives, the more he acts information generation rather than information transmission. The conclusion offers a summary and implications of the findings, discusses the limitations of the research, and make directions for further research.