微博中品牌拟人化对线上消费者品牌投入的影响:以杜蕾斯为例

The Impact of Brand Anthropomorphism on Online Consumer Brand Engagement:A Mediated Test

营销实践中不少品牌在微博上以拟人化形象与消费者互动,这种品牌拟人化手段已被广大企业和消费者接受。本研究使用回归分析和bootstrap方法对杜蕾斯微博消费者调查数据进行分析,探讨在微博上的品牌拟人化对线上消费者品牌投入的作用机制。研究发现:品牌拟人化对线上消费者品牌投入有促进作用,社会临场感在其中起部分中介作用。

Over the last decades,many companies have started to use brand anthropomorphism as a brand strategy on a social networking site called Weibo to evoke online consumer brand engagement.Consumers recognize the brand as a human-being through brand anthropomorphic behavior such as adopting first-person communications on Weibo.Online consumer brand engagement(OCBE)can be defined as the connection,creation and communication of brand story between the firm and consumers(both existing and prospects),using brand or brand-related language,images and meanings via the firm’s social networking site.Recent studies on brand anthropomorphism mostly focused on anthropomorphic advertising imagery instead of anthropomorphic firm-generated contents(FGC)on social networking sites.Since consumers and brands on social networking sites communicate with each other in the form of written information,what the brands put onto the platform can affect the consumers’feelings.Therefore,it is practical to deeply understand how FGCs facilitate consumers’online interacting behavior and positive buying decision.Focusing on this issue,and according to the theory of social presence perception,we built a theoretical model with the mediating role of social presence perception to explore the impact mechanism of brand anthropomorphism on OCBE.In this research,we tested the theoretical model with valid data collected from 301 users of Durex’s official Weibo platform via questionnaires.The reason we chose Durex brand was that it did well in anthropomorphic brand strategies to build and maintain relationship with consumers.We firstly conducted a confirmatory factor analysis by using Mplus6,followed by reliability and validity tests and common method bias test.We also used both regression analysis method and software with the bootstrap method proposed by Hayes to test our hypotheses.The findings indicated that brand anthropomorphism positively affected OCBE and social presence perception played a partially mediating role in such relationship.Our research findings make two theoretical contributions.First,we extend prior studies on anthropomorphic advertising imagery to anthropomorphic FGC on social networking sites and presents the impact mechanism of brand anthropomorphism on OCBE on Weibo context based on the theory of social presence perception.Therefore,this paper also extends the theory’s scope of application to explain the mechanism of brands interacting with consumers through FGCs on social networking sites.Second,our research enriches the study on OCBE under the background of Chinese culture,which is meaningful because some scholars called for more holistic understanding about OCBE in different contexts since each culture is unique.Except for the theoretical contributions mentioned above,there are also some practical implications for marketers.Firstly,marketers can make use of brand anthropomorphism strategy to evoke consumer’s online brand engagement in Weibo.For instance,they can post some brand-related or unrelated contents with anthropomorphic words(e.g.first-person word or brand’s nickname)on their own brand official Weibo platform.In addition,some former studies showed that brand-unrelated FGCs can decrease consumers’precaution awareness to make them more likely to regard brand as friends instead of sellers and consequently,build close relationship.Last but not least,it should be noticed that a diversity of brand anthropomorphic activities is necessary to attract new audience and maintain existing audience.