La construcción de lealtad en comunidades virtuales de marca

Big companies such as Nestlé, Coca-Cola, BMW and Apple consider that virtual communities developed around the passion of their consumers for their brands is a great opportunity for knowing the market and communicating with their customers, and as a consequence, to achieve higher levels of loyalty. In order to advance in this topic, this paper examines the relationship between affective commitment and attitudinal loyalty, as well as the possible moderating effect of participation on this causal relationship. The empirical tests carried out reveal that attitudinal loyalty is positively affected by participation and affective commitment to the brand, which in turn has a positive impact on participation. By contrast, the moderating effect is not significant, although a greater influence of affective commitment on attitudinal loyalty is perceived when the level of participation is lower. Finally, some interesting conclusions and implications are suggested.