A Study on Contextual Richness Benefits in Danmaku-based Virtual Customer Environment

Abstract

Customer engagement has been considered as a prerequisite for the success of virtual customer environments and the current key challenge is how to stimulate it for better activation. However, in the era of web 3.0, technological advances become the direct determinant and important differentiator that change the customers experiences on virtual customer environments, especially with the rapid development of Danmaku-based commenting system. By using the theory of uses and gratification as theoretical lens, the current research aims at investigating the effect of contextual richness of the virtual customer environments on customer engagement intentions and its underlying mechanism. The findings provide the evidence of the positive effect of contextual richness. The current research integrates four perceived benefits and an important finding of this study shows the significant mediating effect of cognitive, personal-integrative, and social integrative benefits, except for hedonic benefits, which is turned out to be more content-oriented. Also, the current research incorporates attachment anxiety as a moderator and uncovers the subtle difference of the effect of attachment anxiety on social integrative and personal-integrative benefits, which is usually confused and simply put at the same perspective instead of clearly distinguished when it comes to the interpersonal relationships. The results support the significant moderating effect of attachment anxiety on social integrative benefits rather than personal-integrative benefits. Overall, the findings add to the underexplored field of new type of virtual customer environment and hold implications for research into and the managements of virtual customer environments.