Virtual brand community citizenship behavior, as an important part of multiple behaviors in the community, has always had an important role for the healthy development and influence expansion of the brand itself. There are certain variables in the internal mechanism of citizenship behavior that affect the relationship between the citizens themselves and the brand itself, and there are some brand customers in corporate brand communities who gain brand attention and favor by beautifying their self-image and impression management, but in the brand management practice, is such behavior useful for corporate brand relationship maintenance? Do companies really need such behaviors to enhance the brand relationship with consumers? The authors conducted an empirical study and survey, collecting a sample of citizens from corporate brand communities for relevant analysis, and verified whether impression management plays a mediating role through structural equation modeling. The results show that virtual brand community citizenship behavior has a positive and significant effect on brand relationship, impression management has no significant effect on brand relationship, and virtual brand community citizenship behavior has a positive and significant effect on impression management. Bootstrap mediation effect test shows that impression management does not play a mediation effect in the influence of virtual brand community citizenship behavior on brand relationship. This indicates that companies need authentic and accurate brand community citizenship behaviors to maintain brand relationships, and brand community citizenship behaviors with a fake nature do not enhance the brand relationships between companies and consumers. This study contributes to the enrichment of the empirical literature on brand management and provides a reference for brand management practice.
Afshar, A., Polas, R. H., Imtiaz, M., & Saboor, A. (2019). Customer care service management is moving forward to achieve sustainable customer retention in every industry. Does it play a role to increase brand rentention. International Journal of Management, 8(2), 88-97.
Biesanz, J. C., Falk, C. F., & Savalei, V. (2010). Assessing Mediational Models: Testing and Interval Estimation for Indirect Effects. Multivariate Behavioral Research, 45(4), 661-701.https://doi.org/10.1080/00273171.2010.498292
Bolino, M. C.,& Turnley, W. H. (1999). Measuring Impression Management in Organizations: A Scale Development Based on the Jones and Pittman Taxonomy. Organizational Research Methods,2(2),187-206.
Qijie, C., & Yongsheng, M. (2002). A new perspective on brand relationship management: brand experience management. Business and Management Journal (04),31-38.
Xun, H. J. (2006).Brand Relationship Quality: The Establishment and Validation of an Indigenous Model in China.Journal of East China Normal University (Humanities and Social Sciences), 38(3),7.
Hsieh, P.-L.(2017).Factors Influencing Consumer-Brand Relationships from the Perspective of Online Brand Communities.Scientific Journal of E-Business,19(2),117-145.
Ruochen, J. X. D. (2012).The Concept and Scale Development of Citizenship Behavior of Virtual Brand Community.Soft Science,26(10),5.
Leary, M. R., & Kowalski, R. M. (1990). Impression Management: A Literature Review and Two-Component Model. Psychological Bulletin,107(1),34-47.
Mooney, C. Z., Mooney, C. F., Duval, R. D., Mooney, C. L., & Duvall, R. (1993). Bootstrapping:A nonparametric approach to statistical inference. Sage.
Preacher, K. J., & Hayes, A. F. (2008). Asymptotic and resampling strategies for assessing and comparing indirect effects in multiple mediator models. Behavior research methods, 40(3),879-891.
Polas, M. R. H., Juman, M. K., Karim, A. M., Tabash, M. I., & Hossain, M. I. (2020). Do service quality dimensions increase the customer brand relationship among Gen Z? The mediation role of customer perception between the service quality dimensions (SERVQUAL) and brand satisfaction. International Journal of Advanced Science and Technology, 29(4), 1050-1070.
Royo-Vela, M., & Casamassima, P. (2011).The influence of belonging to virtual brand communities on consumers'affective commitment, satisfaction and word?of?mouth advertising The ZARA case.Online Information Review,35(4),419-432.
Quan, S. Z., Wei, J. Y., Fei, W. (2010). An empirical study of the impact of virtual brand community experiences on community members'brand identity.Management Review, 22(12),79-88.
Xue, S. (2020).An empirical study of university students'TikTok impression management [Master thesis,Zhengzhou University].
Tibshirani, R. J.,& Efron, B. (1993). An introduction to the bootstrap.Monographs on statistics and applied probability,57(1).
Long, W. L., Bo, W. (2015).A study on the influence mechanism of virtual brand community on brand relationship-the example of Xiaomi community.Journal of Management Case Studies,8(01),71-83.
Jiang, X. C., Ying, Y. L. (2015). Sense of Virtual Community and Intension of Sharing Knowledge: Mechanisms of Virtual Community Organization Citizenship Behavior and Self-efficacy.(4),923-927.
