Never, Never Together Again: How Postpurchase Affect Drives Consumer Outcomes Within the Context of Online Consumer Support Communities

Online support communities are popular for consumers of information technology products who might need help identifying or resolving a problem. Information technology products, in general, have their own needs and requirements. Prior research has focused on the intermediate benefits of online suppor...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of the Association for Information Systems 2019, Vol.20 (1), p.58-104
Main Authors: Park, EunHee, Im, Ghiyoung, Storey, Veda C., Baskerville, Richard L.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Alliances
Appraisals
Citizen participation
Cognition
Cognition & reasoning
Communication
Community
Community participation
Consumer behavior
Consumers
Customer services
Data collection
Decision making
Emotions
Failure
Influence
Information technology
Management information systems
Netnography
Problem solving
Product life cycle
Psychologists
Technology Acceptance Model
Theory
Trouble shooting
Value creation
Virtual communities
Citations: Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Online support communities are popular for consumers of information technology products who might need help identifying or resolving a problem. Information technology products, in general, have their own needs and requirements. Prior research has focused on the intermediate benefits of online support communities to companies, such as knowledge contribution and community participation. This study, in contrast, investigates the less explored issue of value creation by online support communities with respect to consumer postpurchase outcomes. To do so, we develop an affect (emotional) process model to understand how customers' postpurchase outcomes of information technology products are influenced through cognitive and affective processes after a product failure. Special attention is paid to the roles of affect during the recovery process. An empirical assessment of the model uses two online support communities, with a netnography methodology employed for data collection. The results suggest that consumers' postpurchase outcomes are influenced by affect and regulation, not just cognition. Key influences emerge as the consumers' own problem appraisals and affective experiences, the consumers' social group, and regulation provided by company technicians and/or community experts.
ISSN:1536-9323
1536-9323
DOI:10.17705/1jais.00529