The popularity of live streaming is driving the emergence of a new business model, known as live-streaming commerce (LSC). Consumers spend more and more time on smartphones, and the emerging business model of live-streaming commerce (LSC) is flourishing in the retail industry. With highly interactive features, LSC social interactions influence viewer purchase behaviors. To examine the interactions between influencers and viewers, we collected a rich dataset from a leading LSC service platform and integrated research models from the natural language process (NLP) field and econometric models.

Online social interactions are known to be useful to improve business performances. As l ocal business retailers have limited resources in marketing, they can benefit by using onli ne social interactions for their business performances. In the same line of purpose, the ret ailers also exploit an online platform, such as discount coupon sites: they sell online coup ons for their offline products and services in the platform. Notably, the online platform ca n play an important role in generating online social interactions as well as final sales arou nd the retailing brands. It also provides a distinctive setting for consumers in that they pur chase products and services online only to consume their use offline. Given that consume rs are motivated by different purposes, their online social interactions may differ in the di sparity of purchasing online and consuming offline. Previous studies have witnessed the r elationship between social interactions and sales, but the relationship between environme ntal influences and social interactions remains unexplored. In this paper, we focus on the influences of online and offline environments where consumers are situated with the online platform on generating online social interactions as well as final sales. To this end, we look into two types of social interactions, i.e., product discussion and social referral, and two distinctive environmental influences, i.e., the influences from the same product page and from the local retail revenue where the focal business is located. Using data on online social interactions and offline retail revenues around a major coupon site in South Korea, our empirical analysis demonstrates interesting findings. The two types of social interactions and final sales respond in different way to the environmental influences. To be specific, in the online purchase context, the absolute influence lowers the generation of product discussion and sales while promoting social referrals. In the offline consumption context, however, the proportionate influence plays a role in driving these three outcomes. Our findings suggest that local business retailers should deploy their online platform strategies by concerning online and offline environments, in accordance with the specific marketing objectives regarding social interactions and sales.

In fashion marketing, celebrity endorsement is a widely-used strategy to gain attention and produce positive brand knowledge (Carroll, 2009). Luxury brands use their social media accounts to post pictures of celebrity endorsers using their products. This is an effective strategy because celebrity endorsement posts could encourage fans of the celebrity to repost, like or comment on this post. This is beneficial for the brand because this results in more brand exposures. The question is how luxury brands can use celebrity endorsements successfully in the digital age. For example, should luxury brands localize the celebrity endorsement in social media? The dilemma of standardization and localization becomes very significant when luxury brands are facing a culturally different market (Liu et al., 2016). This paper examines the effectiveness of localized celebrity endorsements for luxury brands in Chinese social media based on an analysis of online big data and two experiments. First, a multi-level analysis of the posts of 33 luxury brands suggests that localized (Chinese) celebrity endorsers trigger more social media interactions than standardized (Western) celebrity endorsers. Next, the following experimental studies reveal that local endorsers do not enhance perceived brand luxury and individuals’ level of patriotism moderates the effect of localized (vs. standardized) celebrity endorsements on perceived brand luxury. For people with lower level of patriotism, localized celebrity endorsements reduce the perceived brand luxury. In contrast, for people with higher level of patriotism, localized celebrity endorsements lead to higher perceived brand luxury.

Social interactions have been established as a means to help promotions and sales for manufacturers and retailers. Word-of-mouth (WOM), in particular, is proven to increase awareness and drive purchases. Given that small offline retailers have limited resources in marketing, online WOM can play a key role for their offline business performance. In this paper, we focus on two types of online WOM, public discussion and social referral, and study their generation processes by taking into account the multichannel context of both online purchases and offline consumption. To this end, we combine data from three sources: product (or deal)-level sales from a major deal site in South Korea, social interaction records collected by web crawling, and retail revenues at a district level from Korea National Statistical Office. We use a multivariate poison lognormal model to estimate three equations in the same structure with correlated errors, which only differs by the following dependent variables: number of product discussion, number of social referral, and the number of social coupons sold. Our empirical analyses suggest the following. First, the two types of WOM respond in opposite directions for the influencers in the multichannel sales context: the greater number of co-located online deals decreases public discussion but increases social referral. Next, the larger offline retail size increases public discussion, but has no significant effect on social referral. Finally, the results provide practical insights that small offline retailers can improve sales in the multichannel context by effectively managing the generation of different types of online WOM.

Despite the positive outcomes of brand-consumer interactions on social media documented in the literature, an important question still remains: Are active brand-consumer interactions always beneficial to luxury fashion brands? This study argues that such interactions may undermine the core perceptions of the brands by making consumers feel too close to the brands. Drawing upon construal level theory of psychological distance, the purpose of this study is to examine the negative effects of brand-consumer interactions on perceptions of luxury fashion brands (i.e., social perception, uniqueness perception, quality perception) in a social media context. Two experimental studies were conducted. The purpose of Study 1 was to test the hypothesis that luxury brands, compared to mainstream brands, will be perceived as more psychologically distant and abstract. Study 1 used a 2 (brand category: luxury vs. mainstream) x 2 (brand replicates) mixed-model design in which the brand category was a between-subject factor and the brand replicates were a within-subject factor. Fifty-nine subjects recruited from Amazon MTurk participated in the study. The results of Study 1 revealed that luxury brands are inherently psychologically distant than mainstream brands. The purpose of Study 2 was to test the impact of brand-consumer interactions (i.e., high vs. low) and the mediating role of psychological distance on the three perceptions of luxury brands (i.e., social perception, uniqueness perception, quality perception) on social media. A single factor between-subjects design was used, and a total of 74 participants were recruited from Amazon MTurk. To manipulate the level of consumer-brand interaction (high vs. low), two versions of a luxury brand’s mock Facebook pages were created. For the high interaction condition, the brand responded to consumers’ posts in a friendly way and displayed the images of user photos. For the low interaction condition, the brand did not respond to consumers’ posts and displayed no images of users. As predicted, the results showed that participants indicated lower brand perceptions when the brand’s social media page displayed a high level of interactions than a low level of interactions. Moreover, formality, a measure of psychological distance, partially mediated the relationship between brand-consumer interactions and all the three brand perceptions. The findings of this study provide empirical evidence that active consumer-brand interactions on social media do not necessarily benefit luxury fashion brands, rather they can damage consumer perceptions of the brands. This study provides important implications that luxury fashion brands should maintain a sacred distance on social media; otherwise it will undermine important perceptions of the brands such as status signaling, exclusivity, and quality.

We investigate the effect of offline social interactions on online shopping demand and the moderating role of online channel preference in this offline-online relationship. To be specific, we intend to obtain empirical evidence by answering the following questions. First, do offline social interactions affect online demand? Second, to what degree do the active versus passive kinds of offline social interactions have the differential influence on online shopping demand? Third, how does online channel preference affect the effect of offline social interaction on online shopping demand? Drawing on the related literature in the fields of social interactions and Internet retailing, we hypothesize that the active kind of offline social interactions exerts positive influence on online shopping demand whereas the passive kind of offline social interactions has negative effects. We further hypothesize that online channel preference weakens the influence that offline social interactions has for online shopping demand. Both the positive impact of active interactions and the negative impact of passive interactions diminish in determining online shopping demand as online channel preference gets greater. We obtained sales data between January 2008 and April 2010 from a leading Internet retailer that sells baby products in the U.S. The data includes the information of zip codelevel sales and shipping days. We merged this proprietary data with the following three commercial datasets purchased from ESRI (Environmental Systems Research Institute): (1) 2011 Civic Activities Market Potential, (2) 2011 Internet Market Potential, and (3) 2011 Baby Products Market Potential). Each of these datasets includes the information of offline social interactions, online shopping preferences and offline baby product sales, respectively. Finally, as we focus on the zip code-level interplay between offline social interactions and online demand, we control for regional demographics and market condition. As such, we obtained the 2010 Census data and 2009 ACS (American Community Survey) data to account for overall local environments (e.g. population density of children aged less than five years, percentage with college education). Our empirical analyses and hypotheses testing provide the following important findings. First, active offline social interactions have positive effects on online shopping demand. This indicates that active social interactions reflect information exchange among long ties, and this informational influence in turn reduces any risk and uncertainty associated with online shopping. Second, passive offline social interactions have negative effects on online shopping demand. This suggests that passive social interactions take place among local ties and generate normative influence to conform to the expectations of others about shopping behavior, making online shopping as a new channel less attractive there. Third, online channel preference is significantly positive on online shopping demand, confirming prior studies on the relationship between channel preference and demand (Changchit et al. 2014; Valentini et al. 2011). Fourth, the positive effect that active offline social interactions have for online shopping demand decreases as online channel preference increases. Regions with strong online channel preference are likely to have well-established channel propensity and the informational influence of social interactions in reducing uncertainty becomes weaker. As such, social interactions do not play a role in spreading information about the online marketplace in regions where online channel benefits are well understood (Burt 1992, 2005; Harrigan et al. 2012). Lastly, the negative influence of passive offline social interactions gets smaller as online channel preference gets greater. Online channel preference reflects the locally-determined attractiveness of the online marketplace, and this in turn weakens normative influence to conform to the expectations and shopping behaviors of local ties.

행복은 대인관계 측면에서 긍정적인 결과를 산출한다. 그러나 구체적으로 행복한 사람들의 어떤 대인행동이 관계적으로 긍정적 결과를 도출하는지에 대해서는 연구된 바가 많지 않다. 상호작용 시 상대방에게 지지적인 정서를 표현해주는 것은 관계의 형성과 만족에 중요한 역할을 한다. 본 논문에서는 두 개의 연구를 통하여 고각성의 긍정적 정서인 '즐거움'이 상호작용 시 상대방에 대한 지지적인 정서 표현을 유발하는지 알아보고자 한다. 연구 1에서는 긍정적 정서가 성격과 인지적 요인을 통제한 뒤에도 여전히 유의하게 지지적 정서 표현을 예측하였다. 긍정적 정서의 이러한 효과는 고각성 정서로 인한 것이었다. 연구 2에서는 '즐거움'이 유발된 참가자들이 '자랑스러움', '경이로움', '편안함'이 유발된 참가자들에 비해 타인의 이야기에 적극적으로 정서를 표현하고 상대를 지지하였다. 본 연구는 긍정적 정서가 대인 관계에 어떻게 이득을 주는지에 대한 단서를 제공함과 동시에, 그 중에서도 특히 '즐거움'이 사회적 관계 형성을 촉진하기 위해 진화되었을 가능성을 제안한다.