Research On Sharers’ Brand Attitude Change: The Influence Of Personal Goal Orientation And Perceived Values Congruity

When consumers shared their brand experience and brand opinions with audience, brand cognition and brand attitude held by the sharers might be changed. Furthermore, the change would be congruent with audience attitude. According to Shared Reality Theory, the phenomonen was motivated by sharers’ epistemic need and relational need, realized in the process of interpersonal sharing of common inner state. Brand sharers might tend to adopt agentic or communal personal goal, agentic personal goal aimed at “getting ahead” of others and communal personal goal aimed at “getting along” with others. And sharers of different personal goal orientations had different interperonal communication modes. To investigate the effect of personal goal orientation on brand attitude change of sharers, and further explore the interactive effect between personal goal orientation and sharers’ perceived values congruity with audience, two experiments were designed. Study 1 inspected the influence of personal goal orientation on brand attitude change in the different situations of brand sharing and none brand sharing. Study 2 intended to investigate the interactive effect of personal goal orientation and perceived values congruity on brand attitude change.Study 1 uncovered that, only when brand experience was shared, the difference between agentic and communal orientation of personal goal on brand attitude change was significant. Specifically, brand attitude change of agentic sharers was more positive than that of communal sharers. Whereas, when daily life stories instead of brand experience was shared, the influence of personal goal orientation of sharers on their brand attitude change was not significant. The results of study 2 showed that when sharers perceived audiences’ values to be congruent with theirs, agentic sharers had larger positive brand attitude change than communal sharers. When the sharers perceived audiences’ values to be incongruent with theirs, the effect of sharers’ personal goal orientation on brand attitude change was not significant. Whereas, for brand purchase intention, communal sharers had bigger change of brand purchase intention than agentic sharers.