Research On Impact Of Entrepreneurs’ Micro-blogging On The Brand Image And Its Mechanism

According to CNNIC, the number of micro-blog users in China has reached309million up to December2012, accounted for54.7%Internet users, which is58.73million more than that of2011. Micro-blog activates all kinds of Internet applications, builds up an "ecosystem" in Internet, in this ecosystem, each Internet user becomes a "we media", everyone could become a news maker and communicator:the public is not only the audience, but also the media himself. Micro-blog has already become an important entrance of Internet.The coming of "micro-blog age" raised a hot wave of "micro-blog marketing", up to the end of February2012, there is130000enterprises opened Sina Weibo, mainly distributed in22industries, including catering, tourism, entertainment, shopping mall, convenient service, etc. Through their official micro-blog, enterprises can release information, interact with their customers, and eventually improve their brand awareness and reputation. Scholars also give a high attention on enterprise micro-blog, and suggest that marketers should use micro-blog as a tool to contact with customers directly.In the field of micro-blog marketing, scholars have a very high attention on enterprises’micro-blog, but ignored the importance of entrepreneurs’micro-blog. Entrepreneurs usually have much more fans than their own enterprises, this meas that their micro-blogs have a greater influence than their enterprises’official micro-blog. Researches show that entrepreneur image has become a part of the corporate brand image, when customers has incomplete information of the enterprise, their knowledge about the entrepreneur will affect their attitude about the product or company which is owned by the entrepreneur himself. The study on entrepreneur micro-blog is quite necessary and valuable no matter in theory or practice. This paper examines the impact of different types of entrepreneurs’ micro-blog postings(company-related or individual-related) and ways of emotion descriptions (emotional or unemotional) on entrepreneur image, and discusses the effect of entrepreneur image on brand image. Through2X2between-subjects experiment design, we find individual-related micro-blogs have more effect on entrepreneur’s image than company-related micro-blogs do. Comparing with unemotional micro-blogs, emotional micro-blogs lead to a better entrepreneur image evaluation. The evaluation of entrepreneur image significantly influences the evaluation of brand image. This study also examines the moderating effect of perceived congruence between entrepreneurs’ image and brand image on the positive relationship between entrepreneurs’image and brand image. The results are helpful for entrepreneurs to enhance the brand image through effective management of their personal micro-blogs.The limitations of this study are:Firstly, this paper just chose an e-commerce brand to carry out the experiment, there should be a future study on the universality of our conclusion; Secondly, in this study, we control emotion as positive, so we only studied the influence of positive emotion on entrepreneurs’ image, but ignored study of negative micro-blog’s affection, future in-depth discussion is needed.