“公开表达的顾客契合”如何驱动跨境电商企业绩效提升——基于顾客群体传染效应的视角

E-commerce Enterprises:Based on the Perspective of Contagion Effect of Customer Group

跨境电商在数字化与全球化引擎的共同驱动下产生并迅速发展,已成为国际贸易中与传统贸易独立并行的又一重要渠道,在服务主导的商业逻辑中,跨境电商企业与海外顾客的契合关系创造企业价值。本文首次基于顾客群体传染效应的视角,从理论与实证两个维度探索“公开表达的顾客契合”驱动跨境电商企业绩效提升的作用机制,应用社会网络影响理论、IV-Heckit及被调节的中介模型,创新构建组合测度模型以挖掘用户生成内容。研究结果表明:(1)公开表达的顾客契合异质性驱动跨境电商企业绩效,即顾客—企业契合相较于顾客—产品契合的驱动效应更显著,与国内电商情境下的结论存在差异;(2)契合在目标顾客群体间发挥传染效应,具体以“情感偏好”与“特征关注”传染效应的双中介渠道驱动绩效提升;(3)与品牌效应高度相关的企业定价水平U型调节了群体传染效应的作用边界,为跨境电商企业“中等价格陷阱”提供了顾客感知价值视角的解释。本研究为跨境电商企业与顾客价值共创提供了可靠的理论依据与实证支撑,为实现以海外目标顾客为主导的品牌建设实践提供了科学、准确的管理启示。

Digital economy is a key force to restructure global factor resources,reshape global economic structure,and change the global competition pattern.Cross-border e-commerce has become a new business format driven by the“globalization”and“digitalization”engines,independent and parallel with traditional trade in international trade,and can effectively overcome transaction costs,trade frictions,information asymmetry,and geographical distance and other restrictions.In the current business model dominated by service logic,enterprise performance is co-created by the whole value network related to customers,and customer engagement is paid more and more attention.However,the public expression of customer engagement has radiative influence and group contagion effect,which can exert influence and recommendation value among public groups.Therefore,“publicly expressed”customer engagement can further enhance the co-creation value between customers and enterprises.This view is also reflected in the business practice of enterprises.Although previous studies focused on the pre-factors and post-effects of customer engagement,the conclusion that customer engagement creates corporate performance has been repeatedly verified.However,whether this law is different in overseas markets,what mechanism of engagement drives the improvement of enterprise performance,and how engagement plays a role among customer groups have not been effectively explained in relevant studies.In view of this,focusing on the key issue of“How publicly expressed customer engagement drives the performance improvement of cross-border e-commerce enterprises”,this paper takes the user-generated content(UGC)of Shopee platform,28 representative independent stations and Tmall enterprises as the data source to measure,avoiding the subjective problems based on scale survey.At the same time,ensure the consistency between the connotation of the publicly expressed customer engagement concept and the statistical caliber;This paper studies the“black box”of the driving mechanism from the perspective of“customer group contagion effect”,and attempts to reconstruct the whole process of customer engagement promoting the performance improvement of cross-border e-commerce enterprises from both theoretical and empirical dimensions.The results show that:First,the heterogeneity of publicly expressed customer engagement drives the performance of cross-border e-commerce enterprises,that is,the driving effect of customer-firm engagement is more significant than that of customer-product engagement,which is different from the conclusion in the domestic e-commerce context;Second,engagement exerts contagion effect among target customer groups.Specifically,the double intermediary channels of“affective preference”and“feature concern”drive performance improvement;Third,the U-shape of firm pricing level,which is highly related to brand effect,regulates the boundary of group contagion effect.Compared with previous studies,this paper expands in the following aspects:Theoretically,this paper innovatively deduces the internal mechanism of the effect of customer engagement on enterprise performance based on social network influence and information communication theories,and demonstrates the particularity of cross-border e-commerce enterprises from the perspectives of service paradigm evolution,outsider disadvantage and cross-cultural differences.This paper applies the classical theory of social relations to the field of enterprise marketing,which has a distinct feature of cross-disciplinary integration.It broadens the analysis boundary and application range of the basic theory,bridges the gap of the theoretical model of customer engagement,customer value and enterprise performance research,and has a certain theoretical contribution.In the empirical aspect,firstly,the subjective measurement problem based on perception scale is overcome,and combined with UGC as a typical feature of public information,customer-enterprise engagement and customer-product engagement are distinguished,and the combined measurement formula of K-means clustering and CNN fusion is constructed.This paper measures the publicly expressed customer engagement from three dimensions:emotional concentration,feature distribution and overall scale.Secondly,IV-Heckit model is used to improve endogeneity,verify the heterogeneous driving effect of different engagement on the performance of cross-border e-commerce enterprises,and breakthrough test and explore the differences in customer perception and behavior in domestic and foreign markets.Finally,according to customers’decision preferences,the intermediary channels are divided into two paths of contagion effect:“emotional preference”and“feature concern”.The functional boundary of contagion effect is studied with the pricing level of enterprises as the moderating variable,and the“medium price trap”of cross-border e-commerce enterprises from the perspective of customer value perception is proposed from both dynamic and static perspectives.The research conclusions of this paper have certain management implications for overseas customer relationship marketing and cross-border e-commerce brand construction practice:First,cross-border e-commerce enterprises should integrate relationship,wordof-mouth and cross-cultural marketing,break through cultural barriers,and deeply understand the behavior characteristics of overseas customers;Second,cross-border e-commerce enterprises should divide the target customer groups,pay attention to the evolution of the fit relationship,make precise marketing to maximize the fit effect,attach importance to and establish a positive communication and dredging mechanism,strive to provide customer satisfaction solutions,and guard against the group contagion and time agglomeration of inappropriate behaviors.Third,cross-border e-commerce enterprises should establish overseas brand communities,cultivate private traffic of independent stations,penetrate brand concepts from various channels,establish a strong relationship with overseas customers,improve customers’perceived value increment to the enterprise,and step out of the middle price trap of cross-border export e-commerce.