The Impact Of Consumers’ Interaction On Their Impulse Purchasing In Weibo Environment

As a brand-new platform of information release and access in human society, Weibo has brought an unprecedented business effect with its high communication capacity and influence. Through information interaction, hundreds of millions of users obtained lots of product or service information, which influenced on their purchase decisions. Thus, Weibo marketing has become a hot topic in contemporary marketing. At the same time, during all consumers’ shopping activities, impulsive buying behaviors, possessed a large proportion and enterprises have drawn more and more attention in stimulating consumers’ impulse purchasing. Therefore, the way to take advantage of weibo users’ interaction behavior and mining potential customers in the users became as a well-concerned topic. By building a model of the impact of consumers’ interaction behavior on impulsive purchasing in the weibo environment, this study intends to enrich the theory in interaction field and provide advices for enterprises’ weibo marketing.Via a literature review on weibo, consumer interaction and impulse purchasing behavior from both domestic and foreign scholars, some deficiencies were found. And take these as a starting point, the marketing stimulation theory and emotional theory as a foundation, we build a model of consumer interaction, emotional reactions and impulsive buying behavior, and add the impulse characteristic of individual consumers to be a moderator. Meanwhile, this study proposed9hypotheses based on the above model. In order to verify the hypothesis, we adopted the method of empirical research. First of all, through literature reading, interview, we determined dimensions and measurements of each variable. Secondly, we collected318questionnaires which were written by those once influenced by interaction. After screening, there were finally forming216valid data. Thirdly, during the process of data analysis, we pre-tested consumer interaction and emotional reactions with the methods of exploratory factor analysis and reliability test of110questionnaires, and form the formal questionnaire. Then, we examined the validity and reliability of conceptual model through fitting indexes, AVE value, Cronbach’s Alpha coefficient. After that, in order to verify the relationship between each variable, research used the correlation analysis and regression analysis methods. For the last step, the mediation effect and moderating effect were verified. The results show that the consumer information quality, relation intensity and the atmosphere in the process of interaction have a positively influence on impulse buying behavior. Meanwhile, pleasant emotion plays a intermediary utility, and arousal emotion’s effect is not significant. Although the moderating effect exists, the impulsive characteristic also has no significant influence. Therefore, we provides five managing advices:first, the enterprise should open the official weibo account to have benign interaction with consumers; Second, in order to improve the quality of the weibo information, enterprise can invite experts to make recommendations of products by conducted a relevant qualified certification; Third, the enterprise should develop various ways to motivate a highly weibo participation among customers and guide the topic; Forth, enterprises should pay attention to accumulate propaganda materials and consumers’detail content, release weibo regularly, and strive to become a hot spot; Fifth, the enterprise should focus on the negative news during weibo propagation, processing in time to minimize disadvantages.There are two main innovation points of this study. First, the research objection is the relationship between the consumer interaction and impulse purchasing behavior which is seldom involved in previous studies, we fill the gap. Second, as a new form of social networking sites, weibo has distinct characteristic, this study could give the reference for later study. However, this article were merely give the interaction dimensions based on those weibo users who show a need for purchase, future research can be designed for other purposes to form a integrated theory. Also, the result that the moderating variable’s effect was not significant might be due to a deficiency of samples, which further studies are needed to improve. In the future study, there could lead a comparative study on the traditional environment, virtual community and the environment in weibo about consumer interaction and impulsive purchase behavior, to find out the similarities and differences among them, and provide suggestions both theoretical and practical for the enterprise in different environments.