A Study Of The Influencing Factors On Mobile Social Network User’s Response Intention Towards Product Recommendation Information Posted By The Contacts

With continuous improvement of 4 G mobile communication network environment and the rapid development of intelligent terminal technology,smart phone user has increased significantly.The Internet ecology has transformed from “traditional Internet” to “mobile Internet”.At present,with smart phone as the the main carrier,mobile social network application has gradually replaced the traditional media and become main channel for the user to communicate and get access to information.Of all the information posted on mobile social network platform,enterprises show special interests to product recommendation information,because this kind of information directly affects users’ attitudes and buying behavior and therefore increase enterprises’ sales revenue.As the relationships between mobile social network user and the contacts are of different degrees of intimacy,they put high credibility on each other,therefore,enterprises want to recommend their products through mobile social network platform,so as to promote viral transmission of their products information,drive the mobile social network user’s perception and trust of their products and achieve successful product marketing.But enterprises are still in the stage of exploration and lack of theoretical guidance in making mobile social network products recommendation strategy.At the same time,due to the resistance to traditional advertising,the out of control for information released by mobile social network platform,and blind word-of-mouth marketing,many product recommendation information is not accepted by the user;on the contrary,it causes the user’s annoyance and the user is not willing to form reaction intention towards product recommendation information posted by the contacts.They even put some contacts in the shield,thus lead to invalid product recommendation information and can’t contribute to the user’s purchase and re-transmission intention.Therefore,under such background,the understanding of the factors influencing mobile social network user’s response intention towards product recommendation information posted by the contacts,namely,what prompts mobile social network user to form reading,re-transmission intention towards product recommendations posted by the contacts,and purchase intention of the recommended products,is the enterprise’s important marketing strategy.Based on relevant literature review at home and abroad,using the theory of planned behavior,source credibility theory and regulatory focus theory as its theoretical foundation,this study builds the concept model from two aspects: the source and the receiver.First,the study builds a conceptual model about the relationships of a second-order construct source credibility,which is explained by closeness,expertise,trustworthiness,attractiveness,and past experience,attitude,perceived behavior control and reaction intention;then,from the aspect of the receiver,the user’s regulatory focus as both an independent variable which influence user’s reaction intention towards product recommendation information,and a moderating variable which plays a moderating effect between source credibility and attitude.Based on the hypothesis and the initial conceptual model,this study uses confirmatory factor analysis to do a pilot study through small-scale data collection to analyze the effectiveness of the measurement items for related variables,and form the final questionnaire.At last,this study obtains 447 valid data in the formal survey.This study uses SEM(the Structural Equation Model)and AMOS software to test conceptual model and hypothesis.The results of initial conceptual model testing show that three hypothesis related with subjective norms are rejected.Therefore,the variable subjective norms and its related hypothesis are deleted.The modified conceptual model is proved to be fit after evaluation.The results of the formal testing find that source credibility has significant positive effect on attitude;attitude and perceived behavior control have positive influence on reading intention,purchase intention and forward intention;perceived behavior control has significant positive effect on attitude,and further affect the user’s intention to read,forward product recommendation information from the contacts and the intention to purchase the recommended products.Promotion focus has significantly positive effect on the user’s intention to read,forward product recommendation information and the intention to purchase the recommended products;prevention focus has significantly negative effect on the user’s reading and purchase intention;the moderating effect of regulatory focus on the relationships between source credibility and attitude has also gained support.However,the negative correlation relationship between prevention focus and forward intention is not supported.This study has certain theoretical innovation:(1)this study constructs a theoretical model for the influencing factors on mobile social network user’s reaction intention towards product recommendation information posted by the contacts,and the model is verified to be rational through empirical research.(2)this study extends Ohanian’s source credibility model from its original three dimensions of expertise,trustworthiness and attractiveness to five dimensions which further include closeness and past behavior.Empirical study results verify the effectiveness of this model extension,which enriches the theory of source credibility.(3)this study extends the applicable situation of regulatory focus theory.The results verified both the direct and moderating effect of regulatory focus.This has expanded the application scope of regulatory focus theory.The results of this study provide significant management implications for enterprises’ marketing practice.It suggests that enterprises should improve the effect of mobile social network products recommendation information from the following three aspects.Firstly,enterprises should pay attention to improve mobile social network user’s perception of the contacts’ credibility.Source credibility is a second order construct which is explained by closeness,expertise,trustworthiness,attractiveness,and past experience.Given their different degree of interpretations to source credibility,enterprises should pay special attention to avoid excessive release of useless information and information overload in developing product recommendation incentive strategies through mobile social network application platform;enterprises should focus on strategies to improve the user’s perception of the contacts’ expertise and attractiveness;enterprises should also notice the the effect of relationship closeness between the user and the contacts,and formulate strategies targeted to guide consumers to recommend the products to the users whom they trust and feel close to.Secondly,enterprises should pay attention to improve the user’s perception of ease of use of mobile social network applications and to make users feel that they have stronger control ability to react on the product information posted by their contacts.Thirdly,enterprises should design certain settings or games to induce mobile social network user’s promotion focus orientation.By forming situational promotion focus orientation,enterprises can improve user’s response intention to product recommendation information,so as to enhance the effect of product recommendation information.Due to the limits of time,environment,and the researchers’ capacity,this study also has some disadvantages.E.g,this study failed to fully cover the influencing factors on mobile social network user’s reacting intention to product recommendation information intention posted by the contacts;and the relationships of the three factors has not been studied,etc.We hope we can make up for the inadequacy and do further follow-up study on it.