The Influences of Social Embeddedness and Switching Costs on Blogger Retention Intention

Author: 

Hsiu-Hua Cheng

Abstract: 

As growth in the blog market has intensified in recent years, bloggers can easily switch to other blog websites. Blog service providers must adopt viable strategies to keep their customers. However, not many studies investigate the factors that may help blog service providers to retain current bloggers from the perspectives of switching costs and social embeddedness. This study fills this gap and examines the antecedents of customer retention intention on the Wretch, a popular blog website in Taiwan. Three hundred and nine sets of valid data are gathered. Analytical results indicate that switching costs positively affect customer retention intention. Structural embeddedness of blogger-blogger and structural embeddedness of blogger-message positively affect switching costs. Relational embeddedness of blogger-blogger and relational embeddedness of blogger-message negatively affect switching costs. This study demonstrates that switching costs function as an important mediator between embeddedness and customer retention intention. The findings of this study significantly contribute to efforts of practitioners to develop advanced system functions and services on blog websites based on the social embeddedness perspective in order to form an exit barrier, heighten the importance of switching costs, and retain customers.

Key Word: 

Published Date: 

February, 2013

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