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.