The Influence Of Virtual Spokespersons In Advertising On Brand Perception:Regulatory Effect Of Product Type

In recent years,the use of real celebrities as brand spokespersons often brings unexpected risks to enterprises;so many enterprises begin to use virtual spokespersons in advertising promotion.CGI simulation virtual spokesperson belongs to one of them,but this kind of virtual spokesperson is different from the non-humanoid form or the humanoid form spokesperson with low similarity,such as cartoon or cartoon.It is a simulation virtual image which is made by using computer generated image technology and presents the characteristics of human image which are highly similar,and even difficult to distinguish the true and false characteristics.The virtual spokesperson strategy of enterprises can enhance the controllability and plasticity of enterprises for brand advertising spokespersons,and solve the shortcomings of traditional star spokespersons,such as the incompatibility between the image of the star and the brand,the star endorsing multiple brands,and the star moral hazard.Therefore,more and more enterprises try to create personalized and differentiated brands through virtual spokesperson strategy,improve the relationship between consumers and brands,and optimize brand cognition.At present,there are few researches on CGI simulation virtual spokespersons in the academic world.Therefore,this study will sort out related researches on brand virtual spokespersons and brand cognition,and further explore the influence of virtual spokespersons in advertisements and the influence of different product types’ moderating effects on the brand cognition of the audience.After reviewing a large number of literatures and conducting in-depth interviews,this study preliminarily draws the feature model of virtual spokesperson,namely attractiveness,relevance and professionalism,and selects the independent variables of the experiment to further study how it affects the brand recognition of advertising audiences.Secondly,according to scholar Aaker’s brand perception theory,the author introduced brand loyalty,brand perceived quality and brand association as the dependent variables of this paper,and also introduced product types to study their moderating role in brand perception.This paper adopts the scenario experiment method to conduct empirical research.After controlling a single variable,two kinds of advertisements containing different spokesperson images of real person/virtual person are designed,and different text descriptions are used to distinguish product types,so as to obtain four different scenarios.A total of 280 valid questionnaires were collected in this study,with 70 subjects in each scenario.The hypothesis test was completed through descriptive statistics,reliability and validity test,correlation analysis,regression analysis,variance analysis and independent sample T test.The results show that the attractiveness,relevance and professionalism of virtual spokespersons have a positive impact on the brand recognition of the audience.At the same time,product type has a moderating effect on the brand cognition effect brought by virtual spokespersons in advertisements.For hedonic products,the promotion effect of virtual spokespersons on brand cognition is more significant than that of real products.Finally,according to the relevant research results and the actual market situation,this paper summarizes the types of advertising design involving the virtual spokesperson image of existing advertisers,and puts forward advertising strategies for maximizing the interests of brand owners in combination with the background of the new media era.