Social Network Emotional Marketing Influence Consumers’ Purchase Behavior

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This entry is adapted from the peer-reviewed paper 10.3390/su15065001

With the deepening application of Internet technology, social network emotional marketing has become a new way of sustainability marketing. The influencing factors of consumers’ purchase behavior are extracted from a massive social network emotional marketing data set, and the Delphi method is adopted to interview experts to revise and improve the influencing factors. The Delphi method is used to further confirm that trust and attachment influence consumers’ purchase intention in social network emotional marketing.

emotional marketing social network psychological factors

1. Introduction

Emotional marketing comes from the emotional needs of consumers; it can induce an emotional resonance in consumers, and integrate emotions into marketing. In the era of emotional consumption, consumers not only care about the quantity, quality and price of products, but also need emotional satisfaction and psychological identification when shopping. Emotional marketing is not only very important for establishing the business relationship between enterprises and consumers, but also crucial for the sustainable development of enterprises and their brands. Therefore, the emotional marketing environment is very important for enterprises to establish a good enterprise image and achieve sustainable development.

With the continuous development and application of the Internet, social networks have become an important platform for consumers to obtain information on products or services ^[1]. Compared with traditional e-commerce platforms that only help brands and sellers open the beginning of consumers’ purchase process, social networks have constructed a complete closed loop of consumers’ purchase decision-making process on their own platforms ^[2]^[3]. Therefore, many enterprises have attracted consumers’ attention by initiating topics and holding activities on social networks, so as to strengthen consumers’ loyalty and improve the quantity and quality of “honest” consumers. Due to the openness and interactivity of social networks, great changes have taken place in the marketing mode and brand communication mode in social networks. Social network brand communication is a kind of integration and utilization of the deep, long-term and close emotional connection between consumers and brands. It is a recessive means for enterprises to promote their brands and establish powerful brand images. Unlike traditional interest-driven marketing methods, emotional marketing focuses on the interaction between the core connotation of the brand and the stories, experiences and memories of consumers’ daily life, so as to stimulate consumers’ desire to buy. From the perspective of psychology, the operation of emotional marketing can bring a special kind of consumer trust based on consumer satisfaction ^[4]. Therefore, emotional marketing is also considered as a separate dialogue between enterprises and consumers. In this way, the reputation and credibility of enterprises is greatly improved in the minds of consumers. At the same time, cultivating loyal brand consumers is also very important for the sustainable development of enterprises.

Because emotional content belongs to a relatively private expression, and it is also a common way that groups can communicate in a specific cultural environment, emotional content is easier to present and transmit in social networks. In addition, due to the strong driving force of emotion and the psychological state associated with emotion, the consumers’ willingness to participate in the interactive process of communication is more likely to be excited. Once the emotional connection between consumers and brands is established, whether concerned with positive or negative information, consumers will quickly express their emotional state through social networks. These emotions become the evaluation content of the brand, and it is reprocessed in social networks. Therefore, social network emotional marketing is a typical sustainable marketing mode for enterprise development ^[5].

Making use of emotional marketing can not only enrich product connotation and accelerate product popularity, but also strengthen an enterprise’s sustainable development capabilities. Whereas traditional marketing aims at increasing business revenues, sustainable marketing aims at reaching sustainability and business goals. Some reviews and pieces of research show that businesses operating online have to implement changes from traditional marketing to sustainable marketing to move forward in the competitive space. However, at present, there is little research on the influence of social network emotional marketing on consumers’ purchase behavior. Some existing studies have only analyzed the relationship between emotional marketing and consumers’ purchase behavior, without detecting direct or indirect influencing factors from a deeper level, especially from the psychological level.

The sustainability of products or brands requires the persistent attention of consumers, and the purchasing desire and behavior of consumers are affected by many factors, among which emotional factors of consumers often play a crucial role. Therefore, if emotional factors are introduced into social network marketing, it will greatly increase the persistent attention of social network users given to brands or products.

2. Social Network Emotional Marketing Influence Model of Consumers’ Purchase Behavior

Social network marketing refers to a kind of marketing behavior in which enterprises, individuals or other groups use social network platforms to spread and share information, collect feedback, and interact, so as to influence their consumers and conveniently conduct their market research, product publicity and promotion, consumer relationship maintenance, and other behaviors ^[6]. With the expansion and popularization of social network applications, social network marketing has become a new mode of enterprise marketing in the era of social media. This Internet-based marketing model is quite different from the traditional marketing model. Yang et al. ^[7] found that the social network marketing mode has changed the unidirectional transmission of traditional marketing, and the precision marketing function of social networks has greatly exceeded the traditional marketing mode. This is not only conducive to increasing the interaction between both sides in marketing, but can also reduce the marketing costs for enterprises. Zhang et al. ^[8] pointed out that the relationship influencers have with other social media users is the foundation for the success of influencer marketing. Ajorlou et al. ^[9] studied word-of-mouth communication and the mode of word-of-mouth marketing on social networks, analyzed more than 1.5 million posts containing brand content, emotions and opinions, and found that social networks are an effective tool for consumers to communicate through word-of-mouth. Yan et al. ^[10] discussed the operating mechanism and influencing factors of social interaction, and concluded that interaction based on social networks can produce effective cognition, but too much interaction can lead to cognitive confusion. William et al. ^[11] found through a survey of more than 1000 social network users that the longer they used social networks, the more frequently they used them, and the stronger their emotional connection with each other became. Anastasiei et al. ^[12] investigated the effects of emotional marketing on the persuasiveness of social media messages related to products and brands. Sobhanifard et al. ^[13] explored a model of viral marketing emotional methods to increase greener purchase intentions in social networks. They discovered that viral-marketing-based joy and surprise have a significant positive effect on the social value of green product consumption. Wang et al. ^[14] explored the impact of social network marketing influencing factors (i.e., event marketing, product placement advertising and customer service platforms) on consumers’ purchase behavior, and found that these social network marketing methods need to affect consumers’ purchase behavior through intermediary variables. Camoiras et al. ^[15] believed that the opportunities brought by social network marketing are mainly that social networks have a large user group and have a certain consumption capacity, and social network users have high loyalty and stickiness. Bakar et al. ^[16] extracted promotion, brand, opinion leaders, interaction, information and interest as the influencing factors of social network marketing, and studied cognition, emotion and trust as intermediary variables. The analysis showed that brand has a direct impact on consumer behavior, and cognition, emotion and trust indirectly affect sharing intention and purchase intention. Sandip et al. ^[17] summarized and analyzed the strategies that enterprises need to consider when carrying out social network marketing. Through the research and analysis of the influencing factors of social network marketing, they found that brand and promotion have a positive impact on search intention, but there is a negative correlation between information interest and search intention. Sun et al. ^[18] proposed a new marketing model for social networks, which relies on the accumulation of big data and affects the target consumers through opinion leaders.

At present, there is less existing research on social network emotional marketing. Elsäßer et al. ^[19] conducted in-depth research and analysis on the emotional factors in the marketing process, found the influence degree of emotional factors in consumer purchase, and constructed a model of the interaction between them. Nisreen et al. ^[20] found that consumers in a luxury store setting expressed stronger emotional attachment and brand loyalty than consumers in a non-luxury store environment. Amyx et al. ^[21] used data analysis to study a large number of social networks, and found that 95% of them mentioned more than one brand, whereas about 75% of them made an emotional evaluation of some brands, which indicates that consumers can make emotional evaluations of brands through social networks, and enterprises can also affect consumers’ evaluation content through social network marketing, and affect people’s emotional tendency to a certain extent. Halkiopoulos et al. ^[22] used machine learning and data mining methods for evaluating the effect of emotional influence factors on social network consumers. They found that the influencing factors of social network marketing and intermediary variables have a positive effect on the brand purchase intention of consumers, and understood that how users behave when they connect to social networking sites creates opportunities for better interface design and richer studies of social interactions. Li et al. ^[23] applied the user’s emotion and group features to study the influence of multi-dimensional characteristics on information propagation in social networks. Lee et al. ^[24] analyzed the importance of emotional marketing in the context of the experience economy, and proposed a marketing mix strategy from the perspective of emotional products, emotional prices, emotional communication and emotional services. Zhang et al. ^[25] developed a theoretical framework and carried out a meta-analysis of empirical studies to investigate the relationships within the business model innovation. Shareef et al. ^[26]^[27] conceptualized advertising value and consumer attitudes towards advertisements.

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Sheng Bin

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1. Introduction

2. Social Network Emotional Marketing Influence Model of Consumers’ Purchase Behavior

References