內容營銷情景下內容特徵對消費者社交參與的影響

Abstract

With the development of social media, enterprises and consumers can interact on the same social media platform, and are no longer limited to the unilateral output of information by enterprises. For example, on Xiaohongshu, Tiktok and other social media platforms, the brand's official account can release marketing content to consumers, and consumers can also click “like”, “comment”, “repost”, and “collect” the content. Given the high level of consumer activity on social media platforms, content marketing is becoming an important part of business marketing.

Content marketing refers to the creation of eye-catching content to attract and maintain existing groups (Hardey, 2011), and on this basis to achieve dissemination through different media such as graphics and videos, so that consumers can change from passively accepting information to actively accepting information (Yu Boran, 2011). In this study, marketing content is regarded as the information transmitted by enterprises to consumers, and by referring to the division of information characteristics in previous literatures (Luo and Jiang, 2019), marketing content released by enterprises is divided into functional content and entertainment content according to information characteristics, and content characteristics are explored (entertainment vs. Functional) influence on consumer product purchase intention, social participation intention and social participation behavior.

This paper carried out two empirical studies and one field experiment, and reached the following conclusions: Compared with functional content, people have higher willingness to learn and purchase products recommended by hedonic content; Compared with functional content, people's willingness to participate in social activities (like, favorite, review, comment, repost) is significantly higher for hedonic content. The effect is due to the mediating effect of positive emotion arousal: compared with functional content, hedonic content induces higher positive emotion arousal. In addition, when the product involvement is high, the above effect is weakened.

This study also further verified the mechanism by manipulating the positive emotions arousal through pictures. The results showed that: when the positive emotions arousal was low, content features had no significant impact on product purchase intention, content collection intention and comment intention. In order to further explore the impact of content characteristics on consumer behavior (rather than intention), we also released four videos on the platforms of Douyin, XiaoHongshu and Toutiao, namely pure functional video, pure hedonic video, functional before hedonic video, and hedonic before function video, and then compared social engagement among the above videos. The results showed that on the platforms of Douyin and XiaoHongshu, pure hedonic and hedonic before functional videos brought higher social engagement. Specifically, on the Douyin platform, pure hedonic video has the highest liking rate, and the comment rate of hedonic before function is the highest; On the Xiaohongshu platform, the video content that is first hedonic and then functional has the best performance in the likes rate and collection rate.

Date of Award	17 Apr 2024
Original language	Chinese (Traditional)
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Zhilin YANG (Supervisor) & Liyin Jin (External Supervisor)