The Impact Of Brand Anthropomorphism On Consumer Brand Engagement In Weibo

Over the last decades,many companies have started to use brand anthropomorphism as a brand strategy in a social networking site called Weibo to evoke consumer brand engagement behavior.This strategy has been accepted by both companies and consumers.Brand anthropomorphism refers to endowing a brand with human-like characteristics,intentions,emotions,beliefs and minds.That is,consumers perceive the brand is a human being through brand anthropomorphic behavior such as adopting first-person communications in Weibo.While consumer brand engagement(CBE)in social media can be defined as the connection,creation and communication of brand's story between the firm and consumers(both existing and prospects),using brand or brand-related language,images and meanings via the firm's social networking site.During the interaction,consumers would like to offer positive cognition,emotion and behavioral intention to brand.To date,existing researches mostly focused on anthropomorphic advertising imagery instead of anthropomorphic firm-generated contents(FGC)in social networking sites.It is practical to understand deeply about FGC since it can facilitate consumers' online interacting behavior and positive buying decision.To address this issue,firstly,we collected and analyzed 1983 pieces of text data generated in Weibo platforms of Huawei,a famous Chinese smart-phone brand.Then,we built a theoretical model in another study with mediating role of social presence perception and moderating role of membership duration to explore the impact mechanism of brand anthropomorphism on CBE.In the first study,after the text data analysis,the SPSS software was used to compare the different effects between FGCs with and without using brand anthropomorphism strategy on consumers' interaction behavior,such as consumers' reviewing behavior and liking behavior and forwarding behavior.The results find out that compared to the FGCs without using brand anthropomorphism strategy,the opposite ones has more obvious effect on consumers' reviewing behavior,which is the most-interaction behavior in social networking sites.Therefore,the brand anthropomorphism can evoke the CBE behavior.In the second study,we tested the theoretical model with 301 valid data collected from users of different brands' Weibo platforms via questionnaires.The results turned out that:(1)brand anthropomorphism positively affects CBE;(2)Social presence perception plays a partly mediating role in such relationship;(3)Membership duration negatively moderates the relationship between brand anthropomorphism and CBE.Specifically,the positive effect of brand anthropomorphism on CBE dies down with the increase of membership duration.Our research findings own several theoretical contributions.Firstly,this research extends prior studies on anthropomorphic advertising imagery to anthropomorphic FGC in social networking sites.And presents the impact mechanism of brand anthropomorphism on CBE in Weibo context.Secondly,we offers a unique view that the consumers whose membership duration is longer might interact with brand online less.Except for the theoretical contributions mentioned above,there are also some practical implications for marketers.Firstly,marketers can make use of brand anthropomorphism strategy to evoke consumer's online brand engagement behavior in Weibo.For instance,they can post some brand-related or brand-unrelated contents with anthropomorphic words(eg.First-person word or brand's nickname)in their own brand official Weibo platform.In addition,it should be noticed that a diversity of brand anthropomorphic activities are necessary to attract new audience and maintain existing audience,since in this internet era,massive information occurs all the time,the boring and unchanging news cannot help a brand to attract new audience and keep existing audience.