| Abstract [eng] |
In recent years, researchers analyzing consumer behavior in the virtual environment, have focused on learning about consumer engagement phenomena (Kaur et al., 2019; Islam et al., 2016; Cheng et al., 2018), and relationships with loyalty, that have been identified in previous work (Bowden, 2009). It has been observed that in the context of a virtual environment, the role of the online brand community is growing very fast (Sprott et al., 2009; Dessart et al., 2015; Munjal et al., 2019; Jang et al., 2008; Brodie et al., 2013; Vivek et al., 2014). Online brand communities create a favorable environment for a brand to communicate with consumers or help consumers communicate with each other. The benefits they provide can influence loyalty (Gummerus et al. 2012). Consumer loyalty is one of the most important consequences of developing relationships with consumers. On the business side, this guarantees not only the profitability for companies, consumer recommendations, but also a long-term competitive advantage in the market. For these reasons, online brand communities are becoming a more important object of consumer engagement, and the prevalence of this phenomenon is a topical issue of comprehensive consumer engagement in the online brand community and the need for loyalty interface research. A significant number of researchers agree that consumer engagement, especially in the context of a virtual environment, has a strong positive relationship with loyalty (Islam et al., 2016; Liu et al., 2019; Kaur et al., 2019). However, there is a great lack of research that analyzes the impact of consumer engagement on loyalty through certain intermediate variables which could provide researchers and brand developers a deeper insight. Researchers who have studied the relations between consumer engagement and loyalty through perceived benefits (Zhang et al., 2016) have found that analyzing relations through perceived benefits allows us to see in more detail how loyalty can be formed. Gummerus et al. (2012) also found that consumer loyalty is formed through different perceived benefits when engaging in online brand communities. In addition, the research results of these authors highlighted the importance of understanding the constructive dimensions of consumer engagement in online brand communities. The scientific problem of the project is formulated by the question - what are the relations between consumer engagement in virtual brand communities, perceived benefits and loyalty? |
