Exploring consumer motivations, engagement and customer value in online brand communities: A perspective from tourism, travel and hospitality services

Abstract

Digital technologies have dramatically changed consumers’ buying behaviours. Overtime, different social media platforms have emerged with varying features that target specific groups. In the tourism domain, these social media platforms and travel sites provide communities where reviews can be shared among members. Against this backdrop, there is little doubt that these communities exert significant influence over consumers’ buying behaviour regarding tourism services. However, recent reports have highlighted that the growing trend of online deviant behaviour is negatively affecting consumers’ interest in these communities, with the concomitant effect of some firms shutting down their online communities. This dissertation provides a synthesis of the literature on this topic and specifically examines consumer motivations, engagement and customer value and how they affect continuous participation. Five research articles (two literature reviews and three quantitative studies) were used to examine different angles of the topic. The findings indicated that different antecedents influence consumers’ interests in online travel communities (OTCs). Additionally, by integrating the social presence theory with customer value, this research found that offline activities are critical to creating mechanisms in OTCs. Specifically, while hedonic value and social value were positively related to offline activities, support was not found for functional value. This implies that offline communication fundamentally contributes to social ties, cohesiveness and pleasure in OTCs. However, firms should be cautious about relaying commercial messages during offline events. This study also found that customers who perceive functional value, hedonic value and social value in OTCs will engage in positive word of mouth to recommend the platform to peers and friends. Moreover, those who visit the platform frequently will recommend it to others for locating useful travel information; however, those who spend a longer time on it will not recommend it for its entertainment features. Finally, platform credibility could be enhanced by allowing both favourable and unfavourable content. However, live editors are needed to screen out content that is misleading, exaggerated and/or offensive to others. Keywords: online travel community, customer value, source credibility, customer engagement, continuous participation