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Research on the impact of streamers’ linguistic emotional valence on live streaming performance in live streaming shopping environments
Unlike general e-commerce, live streaming commerce innovatively allows live streamers to use instant social functions to communicate with viewers and present products in a more vivid way. However, little research has been done to understand the effects of multiple information cues in live streaming commerce. Drawing on the stimulus–organism–response (S–O–R) theory, we develop a two-phase research framework to examine how the combination of endogenous and exogenous cues can influence viewers’ information processing and arouse purchase intention when watching e-commerce live streaming. We also propose that product involvement may moderate the effects of information cues. To investigate the above effects, we conduct a laboratory experiment using self-report and functional near-infrared spectroscopy. In summary, the experimental results show that the richer the cues provided by the live streaming, the better the effect on viewers’ product knowledge accessibility for low-involvement products. However, complex information cues have a negative effect on the viewers’ cognitive processing of high-involvement products, which may distract viewers’ attention from the products and reduce consumers’ product knowledge accessibility. In addition, the introduction of the live streamer, the real-time comments, and the detailed product list aroused the viewers' positive emotions among the viewers and thus stimulated their purchase intention. These findings can help platforms, businesses, and live streamers improve their marketing strategies.
Live streaming has offered new opportunities for retailers to increase their sales, hence its reception of continuous scholarly attention. However, understanding the antecedents of viewer watching and purchasing behaviors in live streaming remains largely insufficient. This study thus constructs a framework from a stream-streamer-viewer perspective to provide a deeper understanding of viewer watching and purchasing behaviors. Using flow theory, both stream dimension (social presence and interactivity) and streamer dimension (streamer attractiveness and streamer expertise) as proposed as antecedents of flow, which motivates viewer behavior. Moreover, the optimal stimulation level of viewers (i.e., viewer dimension) was found as a moderator which alters the way stream and streamer dimensions affect flow experience and downstream behaviors. Structural equation modeling was applied on 367 survey questionnaires to test our framework. Results indicate that both social presence and interactivity enhance flow. Furthermore, flow has a significant influence on continuous watching and purchase intention. Meanwhile, optimal stimulation level negatively moderates social presence on flow, but positively moderates interactivity on it.
People tend to align with the emotional state of the person that is talking to them (the observed). Similarly, while processing information consumers can also experience this emotional contagion. Emotional contagion can activate in those who process information (the observer) similar responses in the autonomic nervous system and the neural responses as in those who create such information (the observed), triggering a certain level of arousal. Neuroscience enables researchers to study emotional contagion by monitoring the activation of neural structures and physiological responses. This study draws on the theory of arousal to investigate how different combinations of online consumer review (OCR) valence can trigger different emotions and customer experiences in the observer (the one who reads the OCRs). This study conducts a consumer neuroscience experiment to monitor emotional arousal. The physiological analyses (through skin conductance response) confirm that the emotional arousal of the observer aligns with that of the observed. The neural analyses (through electroencephalography) show the valence of the arousal, which indicates that negative OCRs activate arousal and pleasure in the observer, while positive OCRs are associated with arousal deactivation and displeasure.
Effects of emotional valence have been observed in lexical decision tasks, suggesting that valence information modulates early word recognition. However, is still unclear the processing advantage of the different valence categories, and how these advantages might be modulated by word frequency and arousal. To clarify this question, a lexical decision task was designed using emotional words as stimuli. Emotional words were divided into three categories: 60 positive, 60 negative, and 60 neutral words. Word frequency was manipulated into low and high conditions and arousal was controlled among experimental conditions (word valence and frequency). In the first experiment, 54 participants performed the task with a maximum stimuli exposure time of 2000 ms. In a follow-up experiment, 42 participants performed the same task with two shorter fixed time exposures (150 ms and 300 ms). The results were similar between experiments: positive words were recognized faster and negative words were recognized slower than neutral ones. Furthermore, this valence effect was modulated by word frequency, affecting only words that take longer to be recognized (low-frequency words). However, the valence by frequency interaction was attenuated for high-arousal words when the pressure to respond was high (short exposure time - 150 ms). Overall, the results confirm that the emotional status of a word can affect word processing at early stages when automatic processes are taking place.
Live-stream shopping is developing rapidly, but the sales levels of live streaming products vary by different hosts. How to increase the sales volume of live streaming products has become a problem. Consumers’ purchase behavior in live streaming is determined by some subjective factors, and the persuasiveness of linguistic style affects this subjective judgment to a certain extent. Therefore, the persuasiveness of the hosts’ linguistic style will lead to changes in consumers’ purchase intentions, which will affect the sales volume of products sold in the live streaming. Based on Hovland’s persuasion model, Aristotle’s rhetoric skills, text analysis, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic extraction model and grounded theory, this study divides the host’s linguistic persuasive style in the social e-commerce environment into five types: appealing to personality, appealing to logic, appealing to emotion, appealing to reward, and appealing to exaggeration. Combined with the sales volume of the product, we establish a regression model, and obtain the influence results of the host’s various linguistic persuasive styles on the sales of live streaming products. The results show that: the linguistic persuasive style of appealing to personality has the greatest positive impact on the sales volume of live broadcast products, but the linguistic style of appealing to logic has a negative impact. Interestingly, the same linguistic style has different effects for different types of products: the linguistic style of appealing to exaggeration has a negative effect on the sales volume of apparel products, but it has a positive influence on the sales volume of digital electrical products. Therefore, different linguistic styles should be used for different product types.
The lack of human and social cues and customer engagement impedes traditional e-commerce until the birth of social commerce. This study investigates how customer engagement in live-streaming digital marketing affects purchase intentions. The results of 1726 datasets from two e-commerce platforms suggest that customer engagement is significantly associated with followership and purchase intention in live-streaming digital marketing. Whiles price is a significant moderator, its effects become insignificant on their purchase intentions once consumers become followers. The results highlight the positive impacts of social elements, including likes, chats, visits, and exposure time in social commerce towards transactional (purchase) and non-transactional (followership) benefits. Finally, the paper introduces a new perception of measuring customer engagement in live-streaming digital marketing and calls for further research into this new paradigm of social commerce to promote business and service provisions even with the restrictions of COVID-19.
Live sport broadcasts can evoke emotions in consumers and allow companies to reach their audience in environments that allow for automatic processing of brand messages. However, only few studies have applied psychophysiological methodologies to assess how the live nature of a competition and viewers' emotions affect the processing of sponsor messages, and prior research has mostly relied on ex-post data. Therefore, to identify the interplay of game outcome uncertainty, viewers' emotions and attention to sponsor messages, this exploratory lab study tracks continuous viewer data during live sport broadcasts. Soccer fans' (n = 11) arousal, emotional valence, and visual attention to sponsors while watching live soccer broadcasts were measured using galvanic skin response, video-based facial expressions, and infrared eye-tracking. In-play betting odds served as an indicator of outcome uncertainty. Multi-level modeling reveals that greater outcome uncertainty increases arousal and the magnitude of emotional response. Further, the data reveal that low-to-moderate arousal and valence-neutral emotional states increase viewer attention to sponsor messages. This study is the first to consider the dynamics of live sports experiences in the explanation of sponsorship effectiveness. It contributes to the literature by using continuous measurements involving psychophysiological data to investigate emotions and attention to sponsors.
While research has successfully linked social media to separate customer metrics, an in-depth conceptual and empirical understanding of how social media affects the stages of the marketing funnel is currently lacking. We draw on extant theories of consumer information processing and source credibility to conceptually link and contrast the relationships between firm generated content (FGC) dimensions of neutral valence, positive valence and vividness, user generated content (UGC) dimensions of volume and valence and the marketing funnel stages of awareness, consideration, purchase intent and satisfaction. Using daily aggregate brand-level data for 19 brands across seven industries, our analysis shows that UGC dimensions have a stronger relationship with awareness and satisfaction while FGC dimensions are more effective for consideration and purchase intent. Specifically, we observe FGC vividness has the strongest relationship with consideration and purchase intent, while UGC valence dominates UGC volume for these stages. Our results also show that brands with high corporate reputation benefit from all dimensions of FGC in the consideration and purchase intent stages. Findings by consumption category show that UGC and FGC dimensions have larger positive relationships with awareness for durables and non-durables, and with consideration, purchase intent, and satisfaction for services. Thus, overall, our study offers critical managerial insights into social media marketing regarding how to leverage both FGC and UGC in managing the marketing funnel and brand reputation.
The present Monte Carlo simulation study adds to the literature by analyzing parameter bias, rates of Type I and Type II error, and variance inflation factor (VIF) values produced under various multicollinearity conditions by multiple regressions with two, four, and six predictors. Findings indicate multicollinearity is unrelated to Type I error, but increases Type II error. Investigation of bias suggests that multicollinearity increases the variability in parameter bias, while leading to overall underestimation of parameters. Collinearity also increases VIF. In the case of all diagnostics however, increasing the number of predictors interacts with multicollinearity to compound observed problems.
Purpose
This study aims to explore how specific cues with new manifestations (i.e. herding message and price discount information) and customer cognitive style influence attention allocation and purchase intention.
Design/methodology/approach
To empirically validate the research hypotheses, an eye-tracking experiment with a 2 × 2 × 2 mixed design was conducted on a sample of 44 participants recruited from a university in China. Repeated measures analysis of variance was employed for data analysis.
Findings
The results show that herding message and price discount information play different roles in viewers' attention and have an interactive effect on attention. Moreover, individual cognitive styles moderate the impact of herding message on attention allocation. Still, two cues positively affect customer purchase intention.
Originality/value
This study guides future research by applying cue utilization theory to investigate the effects of two cues in live streaming. Findings offer practical implications for how live streaming cues affect viewers' attention allocation and purchase intention.
This study identifies and tests how the competencies of live streamers affect the B2B livestreaming sales per- formance, with a particular focus on the moderating role of product type and product competitiveness. By analyzing a fine-grained livestreaming event dataset consisting of 915 brand firms from a B2B livestreaming platform and matching them with actual sales transactions, the results show that the cognitive and social competencies of live streamers have a positive effect on the sales performance, while emotional competence has a negative effect. More importantly, this study provides strong evidence that the effects of live streamers’ com- petencies on online sales are contingent on product type and competitiveness. Specifically, live streamers’ cognitive and emotional competencies have a more salient impact on experience product sales than search products. On the other hand, product competitiveness moderates the interaction effect between product type and live streamer competencies.
B2B livestreaming has become increasingly popular, but few studies have investigated the role of streamers in these B2B livestreaming events. In contrast to the existing studies that explored the appearance and professionalism of streamers and focused on the B2C livestreaming commerce, this study analyzes how streamers’ linguistic characteristics relate to the livestreaming sales performance in online B2B marketplaces by conducting a streamer-level analysis. By combining deep learning and econometric analysis on a livestreaming dataset consisting of 915 livestreaming events across 14 industry categories from a B2B commerce platform, this study specifically examines the impact of three speech acts (i.e., assertive, expressive, and directive speech acts) on sales performance. We first extract three speech acts by combining Word2Vec and BiGRU network with Attention Mechanism (WBA), then use econometric models to examine the effect of the streamer’s speech acts on sales performance, and finally explore the moderating roles of product-level factors (i.e., product novelty and product category). The results show that the assertive and directive acts have a positive effect on sales performance, but the expressive acts have a negative effect on the sales performance. In addition, this study also provides strong evidence that the effects of these speech acts on sales performance are highly dependent on the
novelty of the live product. This moderating effect is particularly significant for sensory products.
Prior studies reported mixed results on how consumers respond to broadcasters’ physical attractiveness. To shed new light on this research gap, this study investigates the influence of broadcasters’ physical attractiveness on consumer engagement in live streaming e-commerce, with the mediating and moderating mechanisms of consumer motivation and emotion. Data were obtained from 810 consumers on the Taobao live streaming platform in China using a survey questionnaire. Structural equation modeling was adopted to analyze the data. Results show that broadcasters’ physical attractiveness is positively related to consumer engagement. Moreover, consumer motivation and emotion play mediating and moderating mechanisms in this relationship. The findings provide implications for researchers and business managers in understanding, recruiting, training, and developing broadcasters and influencing consumers’ motivation, emotion, and behavior in the live streaming e-commerce context.
Live streaming has enabled viewers to interact with broadcasters and peer viewers, as well as tip the broadcaster based on their emotional state. While most tips are small, a minority of viewers tip extremely large. To uncover such unique tipping patterns, we draw on the emotion literature and competitive arousal theory to examine how viewers’ emotional extremity affects tipping behavior and how broadcaster's emotional response moderates the baseline effect. This study contributes to the emerging live streaming literature by revealing the differential effects of emotional extremity on tipping amount and frequency and provides practical implications for broadcasters and platforms to steer tipping behavior.
Live streaming social commerce, a booming branch of online retailing, has enabled online retailers to interact with customers face to face, defying spatial restrictions. Recent research in live streaming social commerce has started to regard streamers' characteristics as important signals that affect customers' purchase intention. Drawing on signaling theory and the match between streamers and products, this paper aims to investigate the heterogeneous effects of streamers' objective characteristics on the sales performance of experience products and search products in the context of live streaming social commerce. Empirically, using the monthly panel data of 10,087 streamers on Douyin, this paper constructs a fixed-effect regression model to identify the effects of two streamer-centered objective signals, namely, gender and assortment depth, on streamers' sales performance. The results showed that (1) assortment depth has a positive effect on streamers’ sales performance, especially when streamers have a high popularity level; (2) male streamers basically perform better in selling experience products, probably due to their high trustworthiness; and (3) female streamers perform better in selling search products, especially when the streamer has a high popularity level. These findings highlight how important it is for brands and suppliers to consider streamer-product fit when choosing suitable streamers.
Highlights
• Review informativeness fully mediated the influence of product description informativeness on product sales.
• Review readability increases product sales and enhances the relationship between review informativeness and product sales.
• Multimedia richness, either from seller-created or buyer-created content, is positively associated with product sales.
• Extreme positive review valence enhances the relationship between review informativeness and product sales.
• As a product of the research process, the lexicons of video game attributes are developed.
Live streaming commerce has rapidly developed in recent years; however serious purchase hesitation do exist at the final payment stage. Contrary to the previous studies focusing more on purchase intention, this research constructed a conceptual model of purchase hesitation based on the theory of telepresence and trust from the perspective of participants’ interaction in order to study the factors influencing consumers’ purchase hesitation in the context of live streaming. By collecting and analyzing data from 293 surveys, the study suggested that consumer-anchor and consumer-consumer interaction both affected positively the social presence and physical presence in the live streaming commerce. Moreover, social presence and physical presence had a mediating effect between the participants’ interaction and trust. Unexpectedly, trust was verified to positively affect purchase hesitation which signified that the trust in the environment of live streaming is more complex than traditional online shopping and that the trust is not the only factor prompting users to buy. The research is one of first to investigate the purchase hesitation in the live streaming commerce and provides theoretical support and practical enlightenment for anchors, platform, and merchants to reduce consumers’ purchase hesitation in the view of interaction.
There is growing evidence that visual complexity plays a crucial role in consumer purchase behavior. However, existing research on background visual complexity’s effect on individuals’ purchase intention in live streaming is limited. This study explores the relationships between live background visual complexity, emotional states, and purchase intention, by drawing on the stimulus-organism-response theory. A 3 × 2 between-subjects online experiment was developed with participants’ emotional and intention data. The results indicate that the background visual complexity of the livestream room influences consumers’ purchase intention positively via the evoked emotional states (pleasure and arousal). Background visual complexity exhibits an inverted U-shaped effect on consumers’ emotions. Additionally, the results reveal a significant moderating effect of gender on the relationship between background visual complexity and purchase intention. Women exhibit an inverted U-shaped effect on emotion and purchase intention, whereas men show a positive linear relationship when faced with complexity.
The rapid popularity of live streaming promotes the emergence of a new business model known as live streaming commerce. Due to high interactivity and rich-sensory stimuli, live streaming easily leads to consumers’ impulse buying. However, knowledge on impulse buying in live streaming commerce is considerably limited. Drawing on the social presence theory and cognitive-affective framework, our study proposes a theoretical framework with which to examine how live streaming affects consumers’ urge to buy impulsively. In an online survey, 267 valid responses were obtained. Results indicate that social presence of live streamer, social presence of other viewers and social presence of product positively influence affective intensity. Results also show that social presence of other viewers and social presence of product negatively influence perceived risk. Furthermore, this study proves that the urge to buy impulsively is driven by affective state (i.e., affective intensity) instead of cognitive state (i.e., perceived risk) in the live streaming commerce context. This study provides a deep understanding of the psychological mechanism underlining consumers’ impulse buying in live streaming commerce. The findings also offer suggestions for online retailers to enhance product sales.
In the emerging retail market, e-tailers operating in developing economies have to cope with the rapid use of the Internet, new electronic purchasing methods and online selling platforms. However, e-tailers do not understand the effect patterns in which customer engagement on purchase intention and customer acquisition. From e-tailers’ perspective, this study explores how customer engagement behaviors are related to both purchase intention and customer acquisition. We obtained live streaming data in the mature e-tail live streaming market environment and found empirical evidence supporting the conceptual framework through regression model analysis. The analysis results show that the specific indicators of the customer engagement are not all positively related to customer purchase intention and customer acquisition, and it is worth noting that the influence of “like” behavior on customer acquisition is no statistical significance. This is expected to encourage e-tailers to rethink their focus on customer acquisition and sales enhancement digital strategies as they operate in emerging markets.
Brands' self-built live streaming e-commerce has emerged as an embryonic and effective way of supporting customer purchase decisions. Moreover, the question of how small- and medium-sized enterprises can leverage IT-enabled factors to survive in the big arena has become a pressing concern. Extant research primarily focuses on broadcaster- and product-related factors by emphasizing psychological mechanisms and ignoring contextual factors from a holistic perspective. To address these research gaps, the complex interaction effects between IT-based atmospheric cues are explored in this paper using a mixed-methods approach. Drawing on affordance theory, we also integrate IT-based features with customer perceptions to further investigate the influencing mechanism of innovative decision-making contexts on customers' quick decisions.
Online reviews are of great importance in supporting the purchasing decision making of online consumers. With the prospering of e-commerce, increasingly fraudulent reviews are appearing on e-commerce platforms to mislead consumers, and an increasing number of consumers are worrying about being deceived in online shopping. However, little research effort has been invested in studying the impact of review credibility perception caused by online review fraud on product sales. To fill this research gap, this paper conducts empirical research on the moderating effect of consumers' credibility perception of online reviews. Here, review credibility perception, or consumers' credibility perception of online reviews, refers to the credibility or trust that consumers have in the reviews they are reading. Building on dual-process theory, this paper develops two hypotheses to understand why and how review credibility perception influence consumer decision-making behaviors. The empirical studies in this paper demonstrate that consumers' credibility perception of online reviews moderate the effect of review sentiment on product sales. This work also found that consumers' credibility perception of online reviews have a heterogeneous effect on product sales. The effect shifts the relationship between review sentiment and product sales from an inverted U-shape relationship to a monotonous positive relationship with the improvement of consumers’ credibility perception of online reviews. This study has great managerial implications for platforms and vendors to improve online review management.
The literature has overlooked whether emotional positivity in social media messages posted by brands has the same effect on different types of consumer engagement behaviors on social media. Furthermore, whether brands’ emotional positivity plays a role in shaping the impact of message emotionality is unclear. To address these gaps, the authors develop and test a model of the impact of emotional positivity of social media messages posted by brands on consumers’ personal engagement and interactive engagement behaviors. The authors also examine whether and how brand emotional positivity interacts with message emotional positivity in triggering these responses. Based on a sample of 62,255 Twitter messages posted by brands the authors find that, in general, emotional positivity has an opposite effect in terms of stimulating personal engagement (likes) versus interactive engagement (retweets). Brand emotional positivity negatively moderates the link between message positivity and both types of user responses.
Travel live streaming has become an important tool for tourism marketers to attract and engage potential travellers, especially after the outbreak of Covid-19. Drawing on the presence theory, this study empirically explored the factors influencing consumers' purchasing behaviour in live-streamed shopping for tourism products. Data were collected manually from live-streamed events and analysed using multiple linear regressions. The results show that the physical presence factor effectively alleviates unsalable situations (i.e., circumstances where the product is not sold), while social presence by itself is not an adequate stimulus to greatly improved sales outcomes. Some basic features of live-streamed shopping such as the professionalism level of the platforms and the live-streaming anchors also play a role. The novel feature of this study is the understanding of the relationships between presence and customers' actual purchasing behaviour in tourism live-streamed shopping (TLSS).
Live streaming commerce has been the mainstream of e-commerce in recent years. Although live streaming research has gained interest, a holistic model explaining why customers are willing to continuously use such a new sale format remains absent. Drawing on socio-technical system theory, we propose a theoretical model to explore the impact of social and technical enablers on trust and how trust affects users' continuance intention in the live streaming commerce scenario. Empirical results (N = 446) reveal that trust can be enhanced through live interactivity (active control, two-way communication, synchronicity) and technical enablers (visibility, personalization), consequently affects continuance intention. In addition, live streaming genres moderate the impact of different types of trust on continuance intention. Research findings indicate that how trust is formed to generate optimal consequences in live streaming commerce.
Live streaming opens a new way for selling products, in which the streamer plays a leading role. Whereas e-commerce live streaming has become ever-increasingly prevalent, how to attract viewers and improve the conversion rate have become problems bothering lots of streamers. Based on 245 viewers' experience of watching top streamers' live streams, we try to find a successful way for small streamers from the perspective of streamer characteristics. This study identifies streamer characteristics from three aspects (attractiveness, competence, and communication style) and examines their effects on streamer's popularity and consumer's behavioral intentions. The results show that beauty, expertise, humor, and passion are all proved to be positively related to hedonic value, and both warmth and expertise are positively related to utilitarian value. Meantime, the results highlight the importance of expertise while beauty shows minor importance. Streamer's popularity can only lead to watching intention, it shows no effect on consumer's purchase intention. These findings highlight streamer characteristics as key factors in affecting streamers' popularity and consumers' watching and purchase intentions and its complex effect in live streaming and marketing.
The purpose of this study is to investigate (1) if online celebrities can directly emotionally influence consumers, and (2) if the other audiences of the same livestream can indirectly emotionally influence consumers to increase their willingness to buy the products recommended by the online celebrities. Therefore, to understand the reasons for the successes of livestreaming e-commerce. Two studies have been conducted: in Study 1, a questionnaire-based survey has been used for data collection and AMOS version 17.0 software was used to analyze the data of the Structural Equation Modelling (SEM); in Study 2, a web data crawler for data collection was developed using python software, and the collected data were processed by ICTCLAS text splitting tool and analyzed by Stata/MP 13.0 software for the econometric model constructed in this paper. This study found that the performance of online celebrities can stimulate consumers' emotions, and thus enhance consumers' purchase intention regarding the products recommended. This study also found that pleasure, arousal, admiration, and emotional trust can influence purchase behavior for cosmetics and clothing. For food products, only pleasure emotion, arousal emotion and admiration emotion can increase the willingness to purchase such products. For other audiences who watch the same Online celebrity for food products, the pleasure, arousal, and admiration emotions can increase searches for, and purchases of the products recommended. This study identified that online celebrities' performances can emotionally influence consumers' willingness to purchase products recommended by online celebrities directly. In addition, the emotions of audiences watching the online celebrities can indirectly influence consumers' willingness to purchase products recommended by the online celebrities.
Live streaming commerce has gained its popularity among consumers, as it creates a novel environment to facilitate viewers to process product information and conduct related behaviors. Elaboration likelihood model (ELM) is applied to explore the viewers’ decision-making process via two distinct routes, comprised of central and peripheral routes. By integrating mindfulness as a moderator, this study develops a research model to examine the effects of central route factors (information completeness, information accuracy, and information currency) and peripheral route factors (streamer trustworthiness, streamer attractiveness, bullet-screen consistency, and co-viewer involvement) on perceived persuasiveness. The research results indicate, by using 395 valid empirical data, which both route factors exert significant effects on viewers’ perceptions of the persuasive message and lead to apropos behavior intentions. Mindfulness positively moderates the relationship between perceived persuasiveness and response intention. This investigation provides theoretical implications for the literature of live streaming commerce and ELM as well as managerial implications for live streaming commerce practitioners.
At the intersection of technology and marketing, the authors develop a framework to unobtrusively detect salespersons’ faces and simultaneously extract six emotions: happiness, sadness, surprise, anger, fear, and disgust. They analyze 99,451 sales pitches on a livestream retailing platform and match them with actual sales transactions. Results reveal that each emotional display, including happiness, uniformly exhibits a negative U-shaped effect on sales over time. The maximum sales resistance appears in the middle rather than at the beginning or the end of sales pitches. Taken together, in one-to-many screen-mediated communications, salespersons should sell with a straight face. In addition, the authors derive closed-form formulae for the optimal allocation of the presence of a face and emotional displays over the presentation span. In contrast to the U-shaped effects, the optimal face presence wanes at the start, gradually builds to a crescendo, and eventually ebbs. Finally, they show how to objectively rank salespeople and circumvent biases in performance appraisals, thereby making novel contributions to people analytics. This research integrates new types of data and methods, key theoretical insights, and important managerial implications to inform the expanding opportunity that livestreaming presents to marketers to create, communicate, deliver, and capture value.
Live streaming offers an unprecedented opportunity for content creators (broadcasters) to deliver their content to consumers (viewers) in real time. In a live stream, viewers may send virtual gifts (tips) to the broadcaster and engage free of charge with likes and chats. These activities reflect viewers’ underlying emotion and are likely to be affected by the broadcaster’s emotion. This paper examines the role of emotion in interactive and dynamic business settings such as live streaming. To account for the possibility that broadcaster emotion, viewer emotion, and viewer activities influence each other, we estimate a panel vector autoregression (PVAR) model on data at the minute level from 1,450 live streams. The results suggest that a happier broadcaster makes the audience happier and begets intensified viewer activities, in particular tips. In addition, broadcasters reciprocate viewer engagement with more smiles. Further analyses suggest that these effects are pronounced only after a live stream has been active for a while and they manifest only in streams by broadcasters who had more experience, received more tips, or were more popular in past live streams. These results help platforms and broadcasters optimize marketing interventions such as broadcaster emotion enhancement in live streaming and quantify the financial returns.
Unlike general e-business, e-commerce livestreaming innovatively enables anchors to use instant social functions to communicate with viewers and present products in more vivid ways. However, little research has been done to understand the effects of social cues in e-commerce livestreaming. Drawing on stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) theory, we develop a two-phase research framework to examine how two widely used social cues (i.e., herding message and interaction text) can affect viewers' attention allocation procedure and purchase intention when watching e-commerce livestreaming. We also propose that anchor characteristics (i.e., attractiveness) may moderate the effects of social cues. To examine the above effects, we conduct a within-subject eye-tracking experiment. Using generalized linear mixed-effects models, we find that both herding message and interaction text can capture exogenous attention. In terms of endogenous attention to the product and anchor, interaction text shows a negative distracting effect, whereas herding message shows a positive spillover effect, negatively moderated by anchor attractiveness. Moreover, endogenous attention is positively related to purchase intention, while the effect of exogenous attention is relatively more complex, involving the competing mechanisms of the distracting effect and social influence. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
In an aggressively growing market, influencers exploit social media platforms to make videos on their chosen interests in an attempt to attract viewers worldwide. Consequently, the platforms provide monetary rewards to these influencers that are commensurate with the number of views and subscribers. We use the language expectancy theory and the emotional contagion theory in an elaboration likelihood model of persuasion to understand why the financial success of influencers varies so widely. We conduct the analysis with speech-to-text data, survey data, archival data, and structural equation modelling. Contrary to the pre-internet persuasion research, the able, motivated, and focused viewers of superstar social media influencers identify the traditionally peripheral elements of linguistic style and emotional contagion as central to increasing the number of views and subscribers. However, these viewers identify content and production expertise, traditionally central elements, as peripheral to viewing and subscriber performance.
Interactivity, which is a key characteristic of the live streaming commerce environment, fosters users’ active attitudes and behaviors in communications and transactions. However, the literature on live streaming commerce, is scarce, and few studies examine how interactivity influences customers’ non-transactional behaviors from a dynamic perspective. In this setting, based on the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) framework, we developed a research model using real-time data to investigate the dynamic effect of interactivity on customer engagement behavior through tie strength in live streaming commerce, which is a relatively new derivative of social commerce. This study developed a text mining method to quantify constructs using a large-scale sample of 3,500,445 online review texts. Our empirical study found that interactivity has a curvilinear relationship with customer engagement behavior. Besides, tie strength plays an intermediary role between interactivity and customer engagement behavior. It was further observed that both tenure of membership and popularity have an important moderating relationship between interactivity and tie strength. The study enriches the relationship marketing theory and live streaming commerce literature. Moreover, this study is one of the first studies to use real-time online data for live streaming commerce research.
Although live social commerce apps have emerged as a marketing channel recently, live social commerce, as a relatively new phenomenon, has attracted little attention. The authors aim to explore the effect of live interactions on social commerce engagement based on the stimulus–organism–response paradigm and the moderating effect of susceptibility to informative influence. The findings show that live interactions (i.e., personalization, responsiveness, entertainment, mutuality, perceived control) positively affect perceived usefulness and negatively impact perceived risk and psychological distance, promoting social commerce engagement. The results provide theoretical insights on live interactions and social e-commerce and contribute managerial implications for practitioners.
Live streaming has recently become a popular direct selling channel which offers small, self-employed sellers unseen levels of consumer interaction and engagement. While the extant research focused on consumer motivation and intention to shop via live streaming, little is known from the seller’s perspective. Indeed, the potential advantages of live streaming commerce are accessible to everyone, but sellers experience different levels of success with this medium. Using a mixed quantitative and qualitative approach, this study analyses Facebook data of live streaming sellers to assess the nature and extent of engagement metrics, and delineate the dynamic, interactive live streaming sales process. We identify four sales approaches and twelve strategies adopted in acquiring and retaining customers. This typology of sales approach representing seller-focused antecedents is mapped against relationship process and outcomes to provide a framework for understanding relationship mechanisms in live streaming commerce.
Leveraging the wealth of research insights generated over the past 25 years, we develop a model of emotional contagion in organizational life. We begin by defining emotional contagion, reviewing ways to assess this phenomenon, and discussing individual differences that influence susceptibility to emotional contagion. We then explore the key role of emotional contagion in organizational life across a wide range of domains, including (1) team processes and outcomes, (2) leadership, (3) employee work attitudes, (4) decision-making, and (5) customer attitudes. Across each of these domains, we present a body of organizational behavior research that finds evidence of the influence of emotional contagion on a variety of attitudinal, cognitive, and behavioral/performance outcomes as well as identify the key boundary conditions of the emotional contagion phenomenon. To support future scholarship in this domain, we identify several new frontiers of emotional contagion research, including the need to better understand the “tipping point” of positive versus negative emotional contagion, the phenomenon of counter-contagion, and the influence of computer mediated communication and technology within organizations and society on emotional contagion. In closing, we summarize our model of emotional contagion in organizations, which we hope can serve as a catalyst for future research on this important phenomenon and its myriad effects on organizational life.
Approach and avoidance are typical behavioral tendencies of consumers when exposed to a new environment. Drawing on the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) framework, this study investigates the effects of atmospheric cues on consumers' approach and avoidance intentions in social commerce environments. We elucidate the interaction mechanisms between atmospheric cues (task, aesthetic and social cues) and consumers' evaluations through the lens of perceived affordances. Then we investigate how three types of perceived affordances (utilitarian, hedonic and connective) influence consumers’ approach and avoidance behavioral intentions. A three-way factorial experiment provides strong evidence that task cues, aesthetic cues and social cues elicit perceived utilitarian, hedonic and connective affordances, respectively. Approach behavioral intentions were affected by all three types of perceived affordances, yet avoidance intentions were only affected by perceived utilitarian and hedonic affordances. This paper discusses both theoretical and practical implications for social commerce research.
This research examines the business impact of online reviews. It empirically investigates the influence of numerical and textual reviews on product sales performance. We use a Joint Sentiment-Topic model to extract the topics and associated sentiments in review texts. We further propose that numerical rating mediates the effects of textual sentiments. Findings not only contribute to the knowledge of how eWOM impacts product sales, but also illustrate how numerical rating and textual reviews interplay while shaping product sales. In practice, the findings help online vendors strategize business analytics operations by focusing on more relevant aspects that ultimately drive sales.
Online reviews provide consumers with rich information that may reduce their uncertainty regarding purchases. As such, these reviews have a significant influence on product sales. In this paper, a novel method that combines the Bass/Norton model and sentiment analysis while using historical sales data and online review data is developed for product sales forecasting. A sentiment analysis method, the Naive Bayes algorithm, is used to extract the sentiment index from the content of each online review and integrate it into the imitation coefficient of the Bass/Norton model to improve the forecasting accuracy. We collected real-world automotive industry data and related online reviews. The computational results indicate that the combination of the Bass/Norton model and sentiment analysis has higher forecasting accuracy than the standard Bass/Norton model and some other sales forecasting models.