The Effect Of Authenticity Of Microblog Celebrity Portrait On Buying Decisions

The development of Internet and mobile Internet has caused information explosion. Facing so much information, consumers lack sufficient time and energy to a comprehensive comparative analysis, and because of the virtual nature of online information, consumers can not visually determine product information. They are willing to search for help on microblog and other third-party new media. Suggestions from grassroots microbloggers have become an important reference for consumer purchase decisions. The authenticity of celebrity portrait is the key to influence consumers’trust and then influence celebrity recommendation effectiveness in virtual environment. With the development of microblogging and other new media, many scholars begin to study new media marketing and consumer decision.The traditional research have used empirical and behavioral methods. They have studied the formation of celebrity influence on microblogging and other new media. However, they have not turned to the effect of authenticity of celebrity portrait on buying decision. The development of Cognitive Neuroscience makes our research of consumer decision making from behavioral level to cognitive level. Using event-related potentials (ERP) and other technologies can help to find out the neural mechanisms of consumer cognition.This study will use ERP as research tool. We simulate celebrity recommending on microblogging platform as the consumer decision-making situations and consumers need to make purchase options under different types of celebrity portrait. We try to explore the neural mechanisms of consumer decision as well as the differences of their neural response by analyzing the behavioral and EEG data. We hope our research can give insights for business marketing decisions and personal influence buliding. According to the behavioral and EEG data analysis and discussion, we get the following four conclusions:(1) The authenticity of celebrity portrait can significantly influence the consumers’ purchasing decisions. (2) Consumers will automatically allocate more resources to the attention under the situation of true crayon portraits.(3) During making purchase decision, consumers are faced with the dilemma of trust. Comsumers had greater cognitive conflicts under the situation of true and crayon portraits.(4) Real and crayon portraits of celebrity may induce more intense emotional arousal and sustained attention allocation of comsumers.