An integrative model for online community citizenship behavior of luxury fashion brands on Instagram

This study explores the creation of online brand relationships from the personal, social and brand perspectives of social media and its influence on the community citizenship behavior to establish an integrative model. With social identity theory (SIT) and the theory of socially shared cognition (TSSC) as the theoretical basis for model integration, this study identifies the key factors that maintain the relationship between online community members and brands and prompt brand members to establish a close emotional connection with the brand and generate community citizenship behavior for the brand.

This study examines community members who own products from luxury fashion brands (e.g. Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Hermès) and have followed the official Instagram account of the luxury fashion brand for at least 1 year, with a total of 582 valid samples. Structural equation modeling (SEM) is used to test the model.

All except for one of the hypotheses are supported, and the theoretical model exhibits acceptable goodness-of-fit. The strongest effect is that of brand community identification on affective brand commitment, followed by that of online co-creation on community citizenship behavior and that of brand commitment on community citizenship behavior.

SIT was used as the basis and extended to the TSSC to integrate the theoretical perspectives. This study identifies the online brand relationship between service providers and consumers, explores possible causes and consequences from multiple perspectives and proposes conclusions and practical management implications as references for marketing personnel.