Starring in your own Snapchat advertisement: Influence of self-brand congruity, self-referencing and perceived humor on brand attitude and purchase intention of advertised brands

Understanding Social Media Information Sharing in Individuals with Depression: Insights from the Elaboration Likelihood Model and Schema Activation Theory

Purpose

How individuals engage with social media can significantly impact their psychological well-being. This study examines the impact of social media interactions on mental health, grounded in the frameworks of the Elaboration Likelihood Model and Schema Activation Theory. It aims to uncover behavioral differences in information sharing between the general population and individuals with depression, while also elucidating the psychological mechanisms underlying these disparities.

Methods

A pre-experiment (N=30) and three experiments (Experiment 1a N=200, Experiment 1b N=180, Experiment 2 N=128) were executed online. These experiments investigated the joint effects of information quality, content valence, self-referential processing, and depression level on the intention to share information. The research design incorporated within-subject and between-subject methods, utilizing SPSS and SPSS Process to conduct independent sample t-tests, two-factor ANOVA analyses, mediation analyses, and moderated mediation analyses to test our hypotheses.

Results

Information quality and content valence significantly influence sharing intention. In scenarios involving low-quality information, individuals with depression are more inclined to share negative emotional content compared to the general population, and this tendency intensifies with the severity of depression. Moreover, self-referential processing acts as a mediator between emotional content and intention to share, yet this mediation effect weakens as the severity of depression rises.

Conclusion

Our study highlights the importance of promoting viewpoint diversity and breaking the echo chamber effect in social media to improve the mental health of individuals with depression. To achieve this goal, tailoring emotional content on social media could be a practical starting point for practice.

Exploring the mechanism of live streaming e-commerce anchors’ language appeals on users’ purchase intention

Introduction

Live streaming e-commerce is an important way for consumers to shop nowadays. Anchors, as salesperson in live streaming e-commerce, greatly affect the sales of the broadcast room. This paper studies the influence mechanism of anchors’ language appeals, rational appeal, and emotional appeal on users’ purchase intention. This study establishes a research framework which based on stimulus-organism-response (SOR) theory, and constructs a model to reflect the relationship between anchors language appeals, self-referencing, self-brand congruity, and purchase intention.

Methods

Survey using a convenience sample (N = 509) was conducted on Chinese mainland netizens through WJX platform (October 17-23, 2022) to obtain data. The partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) method was used for data analysis.

Results

The study found that anchors’ language appeals was positively correlated with self-referencing and self-brand congruity, and there is a positive correlation between self-referencing, self-brand congruity, and purchase intention. Self-referencing and self-brand congruity play a mediating effect between anchors language appeals and purchase intention.

Discussion

This study advances the literature on live streaming e-commerce research and SOR and provides practical implications to influence the strategy of the e-commerce anchors.

Augmented Reality Marketing: A Systematic Literature Review and an Agenda for Future Inquiry

Augmented reality (AR) is a potentially disruptive technology that enriches the consumer experience and transforms marketing. With the surging popularity of AR in marketing practice, academic efforts to investigate its effects on consumer experience, response, and behavior have increased significantly. To obtain an integrated and comprehensive view of the front-line in AR marketing research and identify the gaps for future research, we analyze the existing AR marketing literature through a systematic literature review. Using 99 journal articles selected from the Web of Science core collections, this research sheds light on the general characteristics such as publication year, publication outlet, research design, and research method. Moreover, this research also gains insight into the AR marketing relevant factors such as application area, application context, AR type, and theoretical lenses. The findings of the analyses reveal the state-of-the-art of scholarly publications on AR marketing research. First, the number of journal articles on AR marketing increased rapidly in the past few years, and the journals that published articles on AR marketing cover a wide range of disciplines. Second, the empirical studies in most literature adopted the quantitative research design and used survey or experiment methods. Third, the studies in more than half of the journal articles used mobile AR applications in various online contexts. Fourth, the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) framework are the two most widely used theoretical lenses used in the literature. After that, the major application areas of AR in marketing are retail, tourism, and advertising. To identify the focal themes discussed in the three application areas, this research summarizes the studies by the outcome variables. Specifically, the outcome variables have five categories: technology-related, product-related, brand-related, tourist destination-related, and advertisement-related. Finally, this research proposes the agenda for future academic efforts in AR marketing.

CONSUMER PERCEIVED VALUE OF COLLABORATION VERSUS INCENTIVES IN THE CONTEXT OF IN-APP ADS

Targeting individual consumers through in-app ads requires understanding their unpredictable behavior. To understand the underlying mechanism, this article has focused to identify the influence of self-efficacy, the perceived value of collaboration, and incentives on intention to interact with in-app ads. Self-efficacy is used as a moderator. The perceived value of collaboration and incentives are tested as mediators. Age in terms of digital natives and digital immigrants is used as a control variable. Large-scale online survey data was collected. PLS-SEM technique was used for data analysis. As per result, digital natives and digital immigrants behave in the same way for acceptance of in-app ads. The perceived value of collaboration and incentives have a direct influence on intention. Self-efficacy does not influence intention nor act as a moderator. This research helps advertisers, app developers, and other stakeholders involved in in-app ads services to understand the importance of influential factors found in the study.

Following science on social media: The effects of humor and source likability

Science communicators have been encouraged to use humor in their online engagement efforts. Yet, humor's effectiveness for engaging people with science remains an open question. We report the results of an experiment designed to elicit varied levels of mirth in respondents, which was positively associated with perceived likability of the communicator and motivation to follow more science on social media. Furthermore, mirth and perceived likability serially mediated the effect of the experimental manipulation on motivation and factual science knowledge served as a moderator. This indicates that, while humor might be an effective means of reaching audiences, downstream effects are likely to vary depending on individuals' knowledge.

How different autonomous vehicle presentation influences its acceptance: Is a communal car better than agentic one?

Public acceptance of autonomous vehicles (AVs) is still questionable. Nevertheless, it can be influenced by proper communication strategy. Therefore, our research focuses on (1) the type of information concerning AVs that consumers seek and (2) how to communicate this technology in order to increase its acceptance. In the first study (N = 711) topic modeling showed that the most sought for information concern the communion and the agency of AVs. In the second, experimental study (N = 303) we measured the participants' fear and goal-orientation in relation to AVs. Then, after the manipulation of the AV advertisement (imbued with communal vs agentic content), technology acceptance components (perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness and behavioral intention) were verified. The comparative analysis of the structural model estimates showed that the both participants' fear and goal-orientation in relation to AVs were associated much more with the acceptance components of the communal AV rather than the agentic one. Therefore, people want to know both whether AVs are communal and agentic, but they are more prone to accept a communal AV than agentic one.