Customer citizenship behavior refers to the voluntary and discretionary behavior that are not required for the successful production and/or delivery of the service but that, in the aggregate, help the service organization overall, such as product recommendation and mutual help among customers or reporting problems to employees. Understanding how to promote customer citizenship behavior is important for firms. In the era of Web3.0, the convenience and extensiveness of interpersonal interaction make the influence of customer interaction on customer citizenship behavior more prominent. In particular, in the brand community, customers with similar interests and equal relationships constitute peer relationships, which can lead to changes in their opinions, attitudes, or behaviors during the interaction between customers (i.e., peer influence), thereby stimulating customer citizenship behavior. Based on the social information processing theory, this paper explores the process by which peer influence among customers in the brand community influences customer citizenship behavior by promoting customers’ perceptions of the community climate. At the same time, based on customer relationship management objectives, this paper divides the brand community type into two types: acquisitioning community with customer acquisition as the main goal and activating community with customer retention as the main goal, and analyzes the differences in the formation process of customer citizenship behavior between these two different community types.

The research was conducted in the form of a questionnaire, in which the four variables of peer influence, community climate, customer citizenship behavior, and brand community type were measured based on well-established scales that had been validated and tested in studies. Six brand communities were selected as the research objects through the practical observation method, and then two methods of snowball and random sampling were used to conduct the questionnaire survey among users in these six communities. The study finally obtained 492 valid samples, and factor analysis and structural equation model analysis were adopted to generate empirical results.

The findings show that: In the brand community, the three dimensions of peer influence — information influence, emotional contagion, and comparative influence — significantly promote customer citizenship behavior, but the role of normative influence is not significant. The above three dimensions of peer influence promote customers’ perceptions of the supportive climate and controlling climate in the brand community, thus forming customer citizenship behavior. In the acquisitioning community, the mediating effect of controlling climate between peer influence and customer citizenship behavior is more prominent. In the activating community, the mediating effect of supportive climate between peer influence and customer citizenship behavior is more prominent.

The theoretical contributions of this paper are that: First, based on the perspective of customer interaction and the social information processing theory, it explores the formation mechanism of customer citizenship behavior in the context of brand community, expands and deepens the research on customer interaction in the brand community, and opens up new theoretical ideas for the research on customer citizenship behavior. Second, it explores the differences in the formation mechanism of customer citizenship behavior in the two types of brand community, namely, acquisitioning community and activating community, responds to the call for the classification of community types based on customer relationship management objectives, and complements the research on brand community types. Third, it extends the study of peer influence from sociology, education and economics into the field of business research, and promotes the development of peer influence theory in the online context. At the same time, the findings have implications for firms to achieve effective brand community operations and better promote customer citizenship behavior.