## 1 Introduction  
Brand communities embedded in online social networks have become a powerful tool in marketing communications [1; 2; 3]. Marketers can use a brand community for product communication, promotion, and dissemination of brand-related information to their target customers; they can also use it to interact with their target customers [4; 5; 6]. Previous research on brand community has indicated the importance of the customer's participation to the survival of a brand community [4; 5]. Despite this growing popularity and the general agreement on the influences of the customer's participation to a social network-based brand community, a systematic understanding by brand managers and researchers on how to facilitate the customer's participation remains elusive. Previous research has indicated that a brand community is comprised of marketers-generated information, customers-generated information, its entities (e.g., customers, marketers, and platform), and the customer's relationships with these entities (customer-centric relationships) [7]. Thus, information and customer's relationships with other entities (customer-centric relationships) comprise the core of brand community. Another research has defined the extent of emotional and behavioral attachment of a customer to other entities (e.g., brand, marketers, platform, and customers) as brand community integration [6; 8; 9; 10]. Specifically, they regarded brand community integration as a function of the customers' perceived relationships not only with the brand, but also with marketers, the platform and other community customers [8]. Brand community integration is comprised of four kinds of customer-centric relationships between customers and other entities (customer-brand, customer-marketers, customer-platform, and customer-others) [11]. Brand community integration and information quality have been suggested as two key drivers that motivated the customer's participation intention [7]. However, brand community marketers rarely develop the four kinds of customer-centric relationships in brand community integration and fail to provide high quality information equally due to energy and money constraints. However, only a few studies have investigated which factors more importantly motivate customer's participation intention. Thus, determining the important factors that drive the customer's participation intention more than others is necessary. In addition, [PERSON] et al. (2002) indicated that the four kinds of customer-centric relationships in brand community integration are developed interdependently in a mutually influenced way [8]; however, research has yet to explore the mutual influence mechanism among them. Brand community participation studies have only investigated the integrated effect of the four kinds of customer-centric relationships on the customer's participation intention [12]. However, these studies have neglected the individual effects of the four kinds of customer-centric relationships on customer's participation intention. Another research has indicated that brand community marketers should allocate their limited energy and money to obtain the additional participation of customers [13]. Therefore, distinguishing which relationship is more important than others for participation is significant for marketers and researchers. To address these issues, the current study proposes a conceptual model that discusses how the four kinds of customer-centric relationships (customer-brand, customer-marketers, customer-platform, and customer-others) influence each other and the customer's participation intention with information quality through perceived flow. Previous research on brand community participation has often used the symmetric-based statistical method (e.g., multiple regression analysis) to test the symmetric relationships between the independent variables and the customer's participation intention.