Research On The Marketing Strategy Of Individual Producers Of Digital Content Product

In today’s rapidly developing digital network and service economy,digital content products,especially those produced by average individuals,have brought about a huge impact on people’s material life and spiritual pursuits.Unlike commercial producers,individual producers rely more on their free time and cognitive surplus when creating digital content products,and face more intense competition.In the era of universal creation,many individuals have achieved great success in creating digital content products,which have become commercial miracles by word of mouth.But at the same time,there are many red-hot producers who have ended up in the curtain,such as Li Xiang,who had created a hit product and stopped working in 2019.In addition,behind these “breakout stars”,there are hundreds of thousands of ordinary producers in the market,who together build the entire digital content market.Although the practice of individual production of digital content products is so common,there is less research on how individual producers develop and produce digital content products,and most of the research on digital content products has focused on organizational production.In fact,the findings from previous studies on digital content product production conducted by organizations may no longer be applicable due to the differences in perceptions,resources,relationships,and capabilities possessed by organizations and individuals.So,what marketing strategies should individual producers adopt before,during,and after the release of their products to attract consumers’ attention,favor,and purchase? These are all questions that researchers need to answer.In the field of digital content product research,there is a clear trend of research convergence based on the cross-fertilization of psychology,economics,information systems,journalism and communication,and management,with fruitful academic results.However,there is also the problem that theoretical foundations and research paradigms need to be deeply integrated.Some key research themes in the field of digital content products created by individuals have not been given enough attention,and so on,to be broken through.Specifically,the marketing strategies of individual producers throughout the product process determine its success.However,existing research lacks a process perspective on the whole process.Based on this,this paper takes Himalaya FM as the research background,combines content marketing theory,value co-creation theory and bilateral market theory,and adopts a process perspective to examine the impact of individual producers’ specific strategies on product performance in four processes: teaser release,producers’ own growth,producers’ display and copyright protection.In general,individual content producers should choose different strategies to attract consumers at different stages of product development based on the product and their own characteristics.Specifically,the findings for each stage are as follows.First,about the trailer release strategy.Taking voice trailer of digital content products on Himalaya FM as the research object,this paper explores the impact of voice features and text emphasis types in trailer releases on product performance.That is,this paper tries to answer what kind of voice is suitable to tell what kind of text to be accepted by consumers.Based on stereotype theory and voice marketing practice,this paper measures the warmth perception,competence perception and dominance perception levels of trailer voices using a machine learning long and short-term memory artificial neural network(LSTM)approach.At the same time,this paper extracts the textual content in the audio by using i FLYTEK speech recognition software,and then categorizes the textual strategies(informative vs.emotional).It is found that the warmth/competence perception of the sound positively affect consumer engagement,and competence/dominance perception positively affect product sales.Also,textual strategies play a moderating role in the persuasive effect of voice characteristics.That is,voices with high warmth perception are more suitable for reading emotional texts,while voices with high dominance perception are more persuasive when reading informational texts.There was a positive interaction between warmth perception and dominance perception for inclusion in the trailer audio.Second,about the dynamic growth strategy of individual producers.In this paper,we use objective data from content producers who publish several products on the Himalaya FM platform.The Berry Index is used to measure the level of their growth strategies for either specialization or generalization and to examine their actual impact on product performance.Also,this paper considers producer traits(organized or not,expert or not),product characteristics(official tags,text title similarity,profile length,whether images are displayed,price),and the moderating role of platform activity and competition in above relationship.After controlling for endogeneity,specific findings show that growth strategies have opposite effects on two different levels of outcome variables.Being a generalist or an expert does not balance consumer engagement and sales.Specialization facilitates product sales,but generalist facilitates consumer integration.Moreover,whether or not to finish(official labels),title similarity,and text profile length moderated the effect of the growth strategy on inclusion;whether or not to be an expert,whether or not to be a boutique(official labels),text profile length,and whether or not to include images and marketing promotions moderated the effect of the growth strategy on sales.Third,as far as producer display strategies are concerned.In this paper,we use grounding theory and questionnaires to analyze the content producer display factors of consumers’ willingness to pay.In this paper,a survey was conducted on consumers who had experience in consuming Himalaya FM digital content products.The analysis results of the rooting theory show that the characteristic dimensions of content producers include four major dimensions: professionalism,vividness,credibility and attractiveness.Further,the results based on the data from the primary questionnaires show that: content producers’ professionalism,trustworthiness and attractiveness have a significant positive impact on consumers’ perceived value of paid content products;vividness,trustworthiness and attractiveness jointly determine consumers’ hedonic value;social value of paid content products is influenced by vividness and attractiveness.Consumers’ utility value,hedonic value and social value all play a positive role in the formation of consumers’ willingness to pay and mediate the above relationships between independent variables and dependent variables.Moreover,involvement moderates the effects of professionalism on utility value,vividness/trustworthiness/attractiveness on hedonic value,and vividness on social value.Fourth,about the specific strategy of copyright protection.Using the evolutionary game approach,this paper constructs a behavioral model of content producers,content distributors(i.e.,platforms)and consumers to explore the changing patterns of the behavior of the three parties.The results of the study show that whether content producers are active or not is independent of platform behavior,i.e.,whether platforms are active or not does not affect the choice of behavioral strategies of content producers.The main influential factor affecting the behavior of content producers to adopt active cooperation is the proportion of the initial consumers who purchase the genuine version.This proportion factor depends on the costs and benefits of content producers choosing to be active and the losses incurred by content producers when consumers choose piracy.Moreover,the behavioral decision of content distributors depends on the initial strategy adopted by content producers and is influenced by three important parameters: first,the size of the additional benefits that can be derived from positive cooperation,second,the costs when choosing positive cooperation,and third,the additional losses incurred by content distributors when both providers and distributors choose negative cooperation.Finally,consumer behavior is determined by the proportion of initial behavior of content distributors and is influenced by several parameters: the price at which consumers purchase the genuine version,the cost of acquiring pirated copies for consumers when content distributors are active,and the opportunity cost for consumers to choose the genuine version when content distributors are negative.Based on a process perspective,this paper investigates the marketing strategies of individual producers’ digital content products from a comprehensive perspective before,during and after the product release,and empirically examines the impact of the relevant elements in the multiple aspects of individual content producers’ preview strategy,growth strategy,display strategy and copyright protection strategy.It has some academic value.Specifically,the main contributions of this paper are reflected in the following aspects.First,this paper is a relatively leading approach to measure the abstract sound characteristics of human voice rather than ambient sound using a long and short-term memory artificial neural network.Most of the previous sound marketing literature has focused on the influence of ambient sounds on consumer choice.However,few studies have explored the way in which it is said as a vehicle for text delivery.The research in this paper incorporates both sound features and textual strategies into an integrated research framework and empirically tests them in the context of digital content product teasers.This is certainly a great extension and addition to existing research in sound marketing.Second,in terms of dynamic growth strategies.The research in this paper certainly makes an important addition to the literature on product diffusion/extension and career experience diversification.To date,research on explaining the impact of growth strategies(generalization vs.specialization)on product performance has been inconclusive and inconsistent.This paper conducts that research in a digital content product context and analyzes data across multiple content product categories so that cross-category differences can be observed.Further,previous scholars have examined the impact of executives with experience in multiple industries,professions,and companies(e.g.,CEOs)on current company performance,innovation,and individual compensation.The research in this paper is a preliminary investigation of the impact of individual producers’ publishing experience,an important dimension of prior experience,on the performance of digital content products.Depending on the different growth strategies adopted by content producers,it may serve as a cue for further various other variables(e.g.,marketing activities,competition)and lead to significantly different product outcomes.Third,previous studies of paid digital content products have focused on the impact of the characteristics or nature of the product itself,and related attributes of the consumer,on consumers’ willingness to purchase.It has ignored whether content producers themselves can influence consumers’ judgments and perceptions.In this paper,we expand the theory of information source characteristics and test the corresponding research hypotheses through theoretical and empirical analyses,and refine a new characteristic of "vividness" based on the traditional information source characteristics,in addition to professionalism,credibility and attractiveness.This paper enriches the research on information source characteristics and explores the applicability and extensibility of information source characteristics theory in the context of paid digital content products.Fourthly,this paper explores the balance of interests among content producers,content distributors and consumers.This is an important innovation in marketing-related research,especially in the study of consumer behavior.The dynamic game approach in this paper can deepen the understanding of consumer behavior of digital content products to a certain extent.The findings of this paper,which place the other actors involved in the marketing of digital content products into a comprehensive framework for analysis,undoubtedly enrich and enrich the existing research in the field of marketing digital content products.Fifth,from the overall research level.Previous research on digital content products has focused on the corporate producer level,and the main question explored is what actions companies should take to maximize the performance of their products.This paper is the first to explore the role of content producers’ specific marketing strategies in different segments of the product performance from an integrated process view perspective,starting from individual content producers.The research in this paper significantly expands the frontiers of research on digital content products.It also attempts to investigate the strategies of individual producers in the digital content product market in an integrated manner using empirical analysis and machine learning methods,taking into account both questionnaire and game approaches.This is a useful attempt to analyze the production of digital content products by individual producers in depth in the future.