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Introduction
Improvements of customer knowledge and communication technologies have made customers, nowadays, more professional and influential among each other during service creation and delivery processes. Marketing or service managers have started to pay attention to customer citizenship behavior in which customers act as partial employees to offer labor or knowledge (Bowen, 1986; Hsieh et al. , 2004; Keh and Teo, 2001). Managing customers as human resources effectively can improve organization's productivity (Jones, 1990), efficiency, service performance (Mills et al. , 1983) and perception of service quality (Claycomb et al. , 2001).
Social exchange theory suggests that customers will feel obligated to return favors when they have benefited from others or organizations (Groth, 2005; Payne and Webber, 2006; Xie et al. , 2014). According to the literature on service-dominant logic, customers' perceived value is always determined by the unique service experience (Helkkula et al. , 2012; Vargo and Lusch, 2008). Grönroos (2011) indicates that customers having good brand experiences tend to help the service organization and other customers of the organization. Since more and more customers have hedonistic lifestyles and pursue delightful experiences (Walter et al. , 2014), it is not surprising that a brand supplying functional benefits and fabulous brand experience can establish a high-quality relationship with its customers. However, the mechanism underlying the relationship between brand experience and customer citizenship behavior is not clear. Would brand relationship quality play a significant role in their relationship?
The metaphor of brand relationship originates from the study of person-to-person relationships in personality research and social psychology (Breivik and Thorbjørnsen, 2008; Smit et al. , 2007). If we are in close relationship with other people, we would like to help them get out of trouble and share happiness with them. Customers engaging in an intimate relationship with a particular brand will be more willing to help the brand and also other customers related to it (Blackston, 1992). Although organizational citizenship behavior of employees is well-documented (Moorman, 1991; Smith et al. , 1983), customers acting as partial employees to perform customer citizenship behaviors is less understood. Little literature has explored the antecedents of customer citizenship behavior from the managerial perspective of brand experience. This study aims to address this research gap. Specifically, our main research objective is to...