Understanding how participating behaviours influenced by individual motives affect continued generating behaviours in product-experience-shared communities

The characteristics of multiple brands involved and users’ original content, facilitate a brand-new online platform’s emergence, that is, a product-experience-shared community (PESC), being distinguished from the brand community that has been extensively studied. While popular nowadays, PESC still involves limited research. Mainly, why users volunteer to write a flow of content remains unclear. Our purpose is to analyse the effects of different motivational factors on different participation behaviours, which further influence continued generating intention in the PESC context. Employing the theory of Uses and Gratification (U&G) on a sample of 729 users and using Partial Least Squares-Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM), the study deeply identified the participation behaviour into three levels, i.e. content consuming, reacting, and generating, as well as investigated their relations with motives (utilitarian, recreational, cultural and social motives) and continued generating behaviour. The results show that different participation behaviours are relevant to utilitarian, recreational, cultural, and/or social motives. Furthermore, users continued generating intention is affected by their complete satisfaction with their participation experience. This paper also gives theoretical and practical implications.