Study On The Effect Of Incongruent Headline On Sales Of Content Paid Products

In recent years,content payment industry is booming,and the number of content products is also showing an explosive growth trend.Headline,as the first window of communication between content products and consumers,has become an important tool for sharers to attract consumers and improve product sales in such an environment of overflowing content products.From this,a lot of clickbait came into being.Whether this clickbait strategy really works,however,has not yet been answered.We proposed a new concept,incongruent headlines.Then we constructed a theoretical model to examine the persuasive effect of incongruent headlines.Moreover,we studied the the mediating effect of consumer curiosity,and the moderating effect of product price and sharers credibility.Two secondary study and four experiments were conducted to verify the proposed model.Results show that incongruent headlines have a stronger persuasive effect compared with congruent headlines.Consumer curiosity mediates the persuasive effect of the incongruent headlines.Product price will strengthen the persuasive effect of the incongruent headlines: when sharers use incongruent headline and increase(decreases)prices,incongruent headline’s persuasive effect increases(decreases).Sharer credibility will weaken the persuasive effect of the incongruent headlines: when high-credibility(low-credibility)sharers use incongruent headline,incongruent headline’s persuasive effect decreases(increases).Through studying incongruent headlines,we enriched researches in the fields of product incongruity by taking digital product as research object,user-generated content by exploring its local characteristics and news communication by exploring the content characteristics of headlines.We also reveal the mechanism of incongruent headlines and discusses the boundary conditions,and discovers the different information needs of consumers under different situations.And finally we provided management suggestions for content sharers and content payment platforms to improve the sales of content paid products.