An Empirical Study On The Influencing Factors Of User’s Behavior To Forward The Referral Reward Programs

As Internet marketing continues to develop and people become more active on social and e-commerce platforms,various socialized branding strategies have emerged.Among them,the referral reward mechanism which can help enterprises quickly establish word of mouth and expand customer groups has been respected by many brands and even platforms.The mechanism uses incentives such as cash,discounts,and coupons to encourage users to forward corporate marketing activities on social platforms,thereby attracting more potential users through the active fission of existing customers.However,high rewards do not always lead to effective forwarding,and in today’s interconnected society,the forwar ding behavior of users is often affected and constrained by many factors.It is a huge waste of marketing resources for companies to spend a lot of time and money only to get far less engagement than expected.Therefore,insight into the psychological proc ess of users’ participation in forwarding activities,so as to targetedly increase users’ willingness to forward and improve brand exposure,has become one of the urgent goals of many companies.This study takes the cash prizes activities of Pinduoduo as t he research background and discusses the influencing factors of consumers’ forwarding behavior in referral incentive activities from the perspective of consumers.By summarizing relevant literature and models,this study attempts to use the Theory of Planned Behavior(TPB)model as the basis of its analysis and combines identity theory and social exchange theory to construct a research model to investigate the factors affecting intention and behavior of the users to forward activity information and the degr ee of influence.A total of 697 valid questionnaires were collected in the research.Based on data analysis and discussion,the conclusions were drawn as follows:(1)perceived economic value and altruism,as the main motivation of activity forwarding,showed a significant positive effect,among which the promotion effect of altruistic motivation was relatively high er;(2)Self-efficacy,as the degree of self-confidence to complete the activity goal,has a positive effect on the forwarding behavior of promotion incentive activities;(3)Social identity disorder and reciprocal anxiety have a significant inhibitory effect on the activity forwarding intention;(4)The influence of self-identity disorder and perceived controllability on the intention to forward is not significant.The reason may be the inhibition effect of social identity disorder and the user’s insufficient understanding of the resources required for activity forwarding.In light of the research findings,this paper proposes the following suggestions for enterprises:(1)Prior user analysis is necessary,and companies can thus design a sufficiently attractive reward scale to increase users’ perception of the economics of the referral incentive activit y;(2)Users’ altruistic motivation plays a key role in activity forwarding.Enterprises can consider the improved way that providing rewards for the forwarded(i.e.helper)in the reward program;(3)Optimize the process of referral incentive activities to make the forwarding task easy to u nderstand and operate,and improve the user’s sense of efficacy in completing the forwarding task,which can effectively reduce the user’s reciprocal anxiety in the forwarding process;(4)Optimize the design of activity content from the perspective of use r experience,such as reducing users’ negative perception of forwarding activities by increasing the practicality of rewards or reducing the scale of cash-based rewards.