Abstract: Virtual brand community has become a typical platform for customers to participate in value co-creation. Brand relationship is the basis for the existence of virtual brand community, and is also the fundamental goal of the establishment and development of virtual brand community. Through virtual brand community, enterprises attract more customers to participate in new product development activities, marketing interaction activities, and encourage customers to share their experience, which strengthen the brand relationship of virtual brand community. However, the above-mentioned relationship and mechanism of action are still lack of perfect empirical verification. From the perspective of broad brand relationship, this study uses empirical data to verify the impact of customer participation in value co-creation on brand relationship in virtual brand community, and examines the mediating role of brand experience in the relationship between them. The results show that the broad brand relationship in virtual brand community is composed of three dimensions: customer brand/product relationship, customer customer relationship and customer enterprise relationship; customer participation in two types of value co-creation all have direct significant effects on brand relationship, after brand experience is added in the research model, brand experience has fully mediating effect on the relationship between customer participation in two types of value co-creation and brand relationship.The research results not only enrich the theoretical results of brand relationship and value co-creation under the environment of virtual brand community, but also find a new way to promote brand relationship of the virtual brand community.

Key words: virtual brand community, value co-creation, broad brand relationship, brand experience