The Empirical Study Of The Impact Of The Utilitarian Goods' Employee Spokesman's Features On Consumer's Purchase Intention

With the common development of new media and traditional media,human beings have rapidly entered the era of ominimedia.Under this background,people's consumer behavior has greatly been changed.As the basis of consumer behavior,consumer purchase intention is an important index to predict consumer behavior.How to more accurately influence and predict the behavior of consumers has attracted the attention of enterprises.Currently,Using spokesperson to endorse the brand and product for enterprise has been more and more effective,and there are many types of spokesperson,such as celebrities,specialists,ordinary consumers and so on.However,in recent years,due to some uncontrollable factors,there have been many negative events about celebrity endorsement,especially for utilitarian goods.Accompanied by cultural diversity and the progress of science and technology,the tendency that the employee who is with low cost and down to earth has been hired as the the utilitarian goods' spokesperson is increasingly popular,and its positive effects have been confirmed by practice.For example,NongFu Spring makes documentary series whose leading roles are the worker and Decathlon has used internal staff to endorse its products for many times over these years,which arouse consumers'widespread concern and recognition about products.Research on consumer's purchasing decisions for utilitarian goods has pointed out that when consumers buy utilitarian goods,they are more likely to be influenced by information social influence and pay much more attention to the performance and functions of products.In summary,utilitarian goods which hire employee as endorser are much more likely gain positive results and employees who serve as spokespersons have some common characteristics,such as being down-to-earth,giving people a sense of trust and closely related to the products.However,nowadays,there is little research on employee endorsement in academic circles.What types of products are suitable for employee endorsement?What effect will employee endorsement has on consumers' purchase intention and how does this effect happen?What role do employees' spokespersons play in this process?On the basis of the existing literature,this study based on the The Source of characteristics theory,Match-up hypothesis and Para-social interaction theory,selected three core characteristics of employee spokesperson as independent variable and structured the research model to explain the relationship among the characteristics of employee spokesperson,the para-social interaction between consumers and employee spokesperson and the consumer purchase intention and how this relationships are formed.Considering that some characteristics of the employee spokesperson can render the consumer feel a kinship,closing the distance between consumers and the endorsed products and brands,this study introduce the para-social interaction as the mediating variable,validation whether the para-social interaction between consumers and employee spokespersons mediates the relationship between the characteristics of employee spokespersons and consumer purchase intention.This study collected data through the Internet questionnaires survey,and use SPSS24.0 and Amos22.0 to process and analysis data which is acquired through 324 effective samples.Finally,the empirical results show that:(1)the product association and the task attraction of the utilitarian goods'employee spokespersons'features have directly effect on consumer purchase intention and the trustworthiness of the spokesperson has not directly effect on consumer purchase intention.(2)the features of utilitarian goods' employee spokesperson are helpful for employees to establish positive para-social interaction with consumers.(3)the para-social interaction between utilitarian goods' employee spokesperson and consumers has a direct impact on consumer purchase intention.(4)the para-social interaction between employee spokesperson and consumers plays a mediating role in the relationship between the characteristics of employee spokespersons and consumer purchase intention.Based on the above research conclusion,this study give advice on how to better use the employee spokesperson to promote consumers'purchase intention:firstly,the enterprise use employee endorsements for utilitarian goods can obtain good marketing effects;secondly,the key of promoting marketing effect is to select characteristic employee spokesperson.thirdly,enterprises are supposed to attach importance to establish a positive para-social relationship between consumers and employee spokespersons.