The deeper, the better? Effect of online brand community activity on customer purchase frequency

• Customer brand community participation behavior are in different levels.
• Participation level is not the only factor that influences purchase frequency.
• Regulatory focus is a moderator variable that affects this relationship.

Researchers disagree on how to determine customer purchase frequency based on the level of activity in an online brand community. Consequently, there is a great need to reconcile the mixed findings obtained so far. Drawing on regulatory focus theory, we hypothesize that the effect of community participation may be contingent on participators’ goal-pursuit focus (prevention or promotion). Our analysis of customer blog data in a company-sponsored community together with transactional data of the same company demonstrated that deep community participation among promotion-focused customers significantly increases purchase frequency; however, deep participation has a very different effect among prevention-focused customers.