네트워킹 기술의 발달은 소통의 새로운 채널을 제공하였다. 공통의 관심사를 중심으로 자발적으로 공동체를 구성하는 것이 용이해짐에 따라 온라인에서는 현대 사회의 주요 관심사인 ‘소비’를 중심으로 하는 온라인 소비자 커뮤니티가 생성되었고, 발전하고 있다. 온라인 소비자 커뮤니티는 소비자 사이에서 정보교환이 일어나는 정보원천이라는가치와 집단적 소비자 행동을 가능하게 하는 사회적 매개체라는 측면에서 소비자학에서 연구되어야 할 필요성을 갖는다. 본 연구는 온라인상에서의 실제 행동을 관찰하는 네트노그라피를 이용하여 소비자들의 온라인 소비자 커뮤니티 참여를 파악하는데 중점을 두었다. 이를 위해 소비자들에 의해 자발적으로 생성되고, 유지되고 있는 온라인 커뮤니티 1곳을 연구대상으로 선정하였고, 2주에 걸쳐 대상 커뮤니티에서 소비자들이 작성한 본문과 댓글 전수를 수집,분석하였다. 본 연구에서는 온라인 소비자 커뮤니티에서 소비자들의 참여행동을 분석할 수 있는 분석틀을 우선 도출하였다. 소비자 참여행동의 분석틀은 형태적으로는 본문과 댓글로 분류되고, 내용면에서는 정보, 표현 그리고 관계의 차원으로 구성된다. 연구의 결과는 다음과 같다. 첫째, 도출된 참여행동 분석틀을 이용하여 소비자들의 온라인소비자 커뮤니티 참여행동을 분석한 결과, 소비자들의 온라인 커뮤니티 참여행동은 게시판 별로 다른 양태를 보이는 것으로 나타났다. 둘째, 소비자 참여행동의 능동․수동성과 참여의 빈도에 따라 온라인 소비자 커뮤니티에서 활동 중인 소비자를 유형화한 결과 자기중심적 이용자, 소극적 참여자, 열성이용자, 표현자, 동조자, 평균 이용자 나뉘었고, 각각의 유형에 따라 참여행태가 다른 경향을 보였다.
Advances in networking technologies allow for new and efficient ways of connecting people who otherwise would exist as isolated individuals. People with shared interests now have the tools to make and join online communities regardless of their geographic locations or time zones, and these shared interests ranges from something very specific and professional such as academic interests to everyday life related issues like concern or questions regarding the purchases and uses of consumer goods and services. Online consumption communities operate as a new source of consumer information and a tool for collective consumer actions.
Online consumption communities are of importance from consumers’ perspective as they show a new possibility for consumerism. The purpose of this study is to provide a better understanding of consumers’ participation in online consumption community from a consumers’perspective. The specific aims of this study are three folds: 1) to develop a framework for analyzing consumer online participation and empirically test its applicability, 2) to analysis differences in consumers’ participation patterns according to the nature of participatory boards being used, and 3) to identify consumer types by the variety and degree of their participations in an online community.
This study adopted nethnography as a methodology for analysing consumers’ participation in online community. Netnography is a newly suggested methodology that combines ‘Net’ as in online activities and virtual lives and ‘Ethnography’ which has been used as a participatory analysis methodology in anthropology. It has been used since late 1990s mostly by marketing and consumer behavior researchers to analyze online activities. Unlike the previous approaches such as focus group interview or one to one interview, nethnography does not distort data being collected because no interruption has taken place, and also does not let any stimuli affect consumers and their contextual situations. Another strong merit of netnography is that it could be used to provide both quantitative and qualitative data for analysing consumer behavior. By using netnographic approach this study is able to provide a description of consumers’ online community participation phenomenon as true to its existence as possible.
We try to identify an online community that could be sought after by consumers with different motivation for participation such as information seeking, expressing one-self and relationship seeking, and finally chose www.Lumixclub.com, a consumer driven online community for a digital camera, as our sample community. This community was chosen because consumers often exchange information about how to use digital products, and by uploading pictures taken with digital cameras, consumer express themselves. Also, this community often had offline meetings in order to go on field trips to take pictures together which allowed for relationship seeking activities. Most of all, this community was founded by consumers voluntarily, and is maintained by consumers, which provides an ideal case study for the test of consumerism in action.
The data analyzed for this study represent all posts and comments made from 255 members who participated in the chosen online community in 2 weeks of time from 2007.08.27 to 2007.09.09. Data was collected from three main boards of participation with different functions:information sharing, self-expression and relationship seeking. By using netnography, we were able to collect rich data that could capture all the interactions and also their contexts.
The total numbers of data included 553 posts and 3963 comments.
A framework for analysing consumers’ online community participation was developed using three steps: first, after an extensive literature review a preliminary analytical framework was deduced and data was analyzed using this framework preliminarily by three consumer science researchers. After the preliminary analysis, the framework was modified for better suit the data and to make sure there was no dispute with regard to how to categorize the consumer participation data. The data was re-analyzed using the modified framework and cohesiveness among different researchers were tested for.
The major findings of this study are as follows.
First, the patterns of consumers’ online community participation differed according to the functions of participation boards. Consumers used information board mainly for asking questions with regard to product usage. Consumers exchanged very detailed and customized information by posting questions with appropriate titles and useful information was provided mostly in the forms of replies. This kind of communication mode needs to be further researched in order to identify ideal modes of information exchange among consumers.
Consumers using self-expression board, which provides an easy access for uploading pictures taken with the bran’s digital camera, were mainly interested in posting messages or graphics and did not want to interact to other consumer.
Some consumers tried to build social networks within the online community, and some of them extended online relationship to offline, but a lot of activities were led by a few active consumers and interactions were made only among a clique of people. This results implied that although web and online community is an open space, there may be psychological barriers for entrance for new comers to the community (a.k.a. newbies) which also renders an interesting topic for future research.
Second, consumers’ participations in online brand community were classified into 6 groups using the variety and the degree of activeness. Each type showed distinctive features in their activities and influential power in online community.
‘Self-centric posters(n=76)’ include those who never reply to others’ comments but only post their own comments. Self-centric posters tend to express themselves using express-board and do not endow any meanings with the interaction between online consumers. ‘Passive commenters(n=47)’ are consumers who never post their original posts but reply at an average level. Passive commenters tend to be newbie of the community. Although very small in number, ‘Core users(n=7)’ are the ones who rank above top 10% in terms of posting comments and providing replies. Core users mainly contribute on relationship seeking board and sometimes they call offline meetings to reinforce there relationship.
Those who post their own message at an average level but provided a large number of comments were identified as ‘sympathizers(n=4)’. Sympathizers conduct reactive participation with writing replies and their actions mostly take places on relationship seeking board generally. Reversely, we identified consumers who mostly post their own messages but post commnets to others’ posts at an average level and named as ‘expressioners(n=5)’. As expected,most of expressioners’ postings were found on self-expression boards but were not limited to that board. ‘Average users(n=114)’ are the remaining of consumers and are the majority of online consumer community.
