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A Study of Sharing in Consumer Communities

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A Study of Sharing in Consumer Communities A Study of Sharing in Consumer Communities Abstract: In this paper we study sharing behavior in consumer communities. Using Netnographic approach, deep interviews and focus group we propose a causal model of sharing behavior and we suggest it is constituted of three types of sharing: (1) motivated sharing, (2) spurious sharing, and (3) inadvertent sharing. In addition, motivated sharing is impacted negatively by perceptions of costs, and positively by: identification with members, user’s sense of personal responsibility, user’s overall engagement in the community, consumer’s sense of reciprocity, consumer’s belief in the organizational principles, and beliefs that one is going to gain personally from sharing. Keywords: Consumer Networks, Sharing Behavior, Consumer Communities, Consumer Behavior Track indication: New Technologies and e-Marketing 1 A Study of Sharing in Consumer Communities Introduction Over the last decade or so, consumer communities have been in ascendance (e.g., Kozinets, 2002; Muniz & O’Guinn, 2001). These communities take many forms. Some consumer communities, such as those found on the eBay web site, have primarily commercial purposes of buying and selling gainfully. Others, such as Gnutella and BitTorrent, are peer-to- peer (P2P) networks of consumers who share digital information like music or video files, software programs, videogames, images, documents etc., with one another. Still other consumer communities are found in the chat rooms and user groups that congregate to discuss experiences, and share knowledge regarding a particular product or service. For example, in the MUSE chat- room devoted to the Apache server software (http://ws.apache.org/muse/contact_info), experienced developers help novices with specific software installation and usage issues. Similarly, Slyck.com is a popular file sharing community, offering news, reviews, and opinions, and has very active user forums. It tracks the latest versions of file sharing clients and file sharing network traffic. Others, such as MacIntosh computer enthusiasts and Star Trek “trekkie” fans, are brand communities, organized by admirers of a particular brand, that meet to engage in social interactions and accomplish joint goals (e.g., Bagozzi & Dholakia, 2006). Marketers are very interested in organizing and managing consumer communities, since they offer attractive alternatives to traditional marketing programs like advertising or sales promotions (Algesheimer, Dholakia, & Herrmann, 2005; McAlexander, Schouten, & Koenig, 2002). This is because consumer communities allow firms to identify and interact with their loyal and engaged customers (Algesheimer et al., 2005), socialize new customers to the brand ethos (McAlexander et al., 2002), and provide lower cost service support to their newer customers through the assistance of experienced community volunteers instead of paid employees (see the MUSE chat-room example above). Perhaps the most interesting aspect of consumer communities is that they rely on cooperation among members and in particular, on ongoing effortful contributions by a significant number of them, for their continued functioning (Nonnecke & Preece, 2000). For example, in eBay auctions, unless a significant number of buyers and sellers take the time to evaluate their trading partners’ performance and provide feedback, the reputation mechanism will no longer work (Dholakia, 2005). Similarly, epinions.com relies on its users to provide thoughtful and honest product reviews in large numbers, P2P networks rely on their users to upload (i.e., share) their files so that others can download them, and the MUSE chat-room relies on its experienced users to take the time and the effort to answer a majority of technical questions and solicitations for help that are posed by novice users. In the present paper, consistent with dictionary definitions, we call the effortful contributions that are volunteered by users of consumer communities as sharing. It is noteworthy that even though sharing by members is essential, a vast majority of consumer communities do not compensate users for their contributions in any tangible way. Moreover, at the individual level, users do not have to share their resources with others in order to benefit from the resources that the community already possesses (Karau and Williams 1993; 2001). For example, a user can read product reviews posted by others on epinions.com without posting a review oneself. Under such circumstances, why do consumer community members 2 share their resources with other members? In particular, what are the types and drivers of sharing in consumer communities? We attempt to answer these questions in the present research. At least two aspects of sharing in consumer communities are relevant to our subsequent analysis. The first is that in most instances, sharing involves information goods, and therefore the sharer typically does not give up the good he or she possesses, but simply shares a perfect copy, or in cases like reviews and recommendations, generates original content. In fact, this is an important argument used to encourage sharing in many consumer communities: “The community’s innovative power results from accumulating member-generated expertise and multiplying it by giving it away.” (Hemetsberger, 2002, p.354). Secondly, previous research reveals considerable variation in the amount of sharing in different consumer communities. One study of P2P networks found that over a 24 hour period, almost 70% of Gnutella users shared no files at all, whereas the top 1% shared 50% of the files (Adar and Huberman 2000). However, another study showed that 58% of Gnutella users shared at least some of their files with others (Asvanund et al. 2003). Other studies have shown that in open source development communities, only 4% of users account for more than half the responses given to help other members (Lakhani and Hippel, 2003), and 4% of developers contribute 88% of new code and 66% of code fixes (Mockus, Fielding, and Andersen 2002). In the present research, we seek to develop a better understanding of the determinants of sharing in consumer communities. Note that this paper concerns an on-going research project. We discuss the results of qualitative research involving in-depth interviews with active consumer community members, and present the proposed causal model that we developed as a result of the analysis. In the next phase of the research, to be conducted in December 2005 and January 2006, we are conducting a large-scale survey of a variety of consumer community users, to test our proposed model of sharing using Structural Equation Modeling. We hope to be able to present the results of the Structural Equation Modeling analysis testing our proposed model at the EMAC conference in May 2006 as well. Qualitative Research Methodology The initial (and completed) portion of our research was exploratory, and employed qualitative methods (Calder, 1977). We interviewed a total of 24 active users of various consumer communities. Each interview lasted between 45 minutes and an hour. We asked questions regarding which consumer communities the individuals participated in, details of their sharing activities, and their motives for doing so. In addition, we conducted a focus group of 8 active consumer community participants to elaborate on the findings of the interviews. In addition, we conducted Netnographic observation and analysis (Kozinets, 2002) of a number of prominent web sites (http://p2pnet.net, http://www.slyck.com, http://www.zeropaid.com, http://www.abxzone.com, http://www.infoanarchy.org, http://best2p.com, http://www.filesharingtalk.com, http://reviews.cnet.com , http://38.119.65.153/~p2punited). We chose Netnography since this method was designed specifically to study “the language, motivations, consumption linkages, and symbols of consumption-oriented online communities” (Kozinets, 2002, p. 70). As a marketing research technique, Netnography uses information already available in online forums to “identify and understand the needs and decision influences of relevant online consumer groups” (Kozinets, 2002, p.62). On the basis of this analysis, we developed our model of sharing (see Figure 1). 3 Main findings Our qualitative research, along with a review of the social science (economics, social psychology, sociology, and marketing) literature on sharing led us to propose a causal model of sharing behavior (see Appendix: Figure 1). In our framework, sharing behavior in consumer communities is constituted of three types of sharing: (1) motivated sharing, (2) spurious sharing, and (3) inadvertent sharing. [Insert Figure 1 about here] Motivated sharing. Consistent with goal-directed views of consumer behavior (Bagozzi & Dholakia, 1999), motivated sharing is the deliberate sharing of resources useful to other community members by the consumer. Consumers share their resources with others for many reasons that we briefly describe below. First, motivated sharing is impacted positively by identification with community members, i.e., a sense of belongingness to the consumer community (Bagozzi & Dholakia, 2002; Bhattacharya & Sen, 2003). Identification, in turn, may stem from different sources. Prior research has shown that emotional attachment to the community is an important component of identification (Algesheimer et al., 2005). Some members may be driven to share because they know others personally within the community. For example, one of our interviewees [K, male, age = 24] told us that he shared files
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