In this article we categorize social circles by sense of belonging and explore the relation between social circle types and self-brand connection (SBC). Furthermore, we research the mechanism of how the impact of social circles on consumers' SBC is influenced by self-awareness within a particular social circle and by brand value. Our findings show that 1) the sense of belonging toward social circles has positive influence on SBC; 2) consumers' self-awareness moderates the impact of social circles on SBC; 3) the type of brand value moderates the impact of social circles on SBC. Finally, several suggestions are derived for local management practice in China.
With the rapid development of social economy and the improvement of living quality, consumers are inclined to demonstrate their social status by using luxury brands today. This research explores the influence that the status of consumers makes on their self-brand connection with luxury brands, as well as the regulating effect of self-esteem and vanity from the perspective of Chinese cultural background. The analysis of the data shows that: in traditional Chinese cultural background, the higher the status of the consumer is, the higher the comsumer's self-brand connection with luxury brands is, and vice verse. Self-esteem and vanity have a regulating effect on this relationship. When consumers' self-esteem level is low, if their status is lower too, then their self-brand connection with luxury brands is higher than that of the high status; and when consumers' self-esteem level is high, the result is opposite. The level of consumers' social status has no significant effect on their selfbrand connection with luxury brands when they are in low vanity, while to highly peacockish consumers, the self-brand connection with luxury brands of those with low status is significantly lower than that of the high status. We also have discussed the results and given the marketing proposal in the end.
Firms increasingly use comparative advertising in green marketing to convey information of green products to consumers, but there is still a lack of research on the effect and mechanism of comparative advertising in the green products field. Across four experimental studies, we show that comparative advertising facilitates consumers’ purchase intention of green products (PIGP), because comparative advertising lead to higher perceived diagnosticity of Information. Yet, comparative advertising does not always bring high intention to buy green products. When using egoistic appeals, the perceived diagnosticity of information and purchase intention of green products were higher in comparative advertising than in non-comparative advertising. When utilizing altruistic appeals, there was no significant difference between the two kinds of advertising. In addition, individual differences of consumers also affect the effect of comparative advertising. The positive effect of comparative advertising on the purchase intention of green products is weakened for consumers with high green involvement. Our findings advance existing knowledge about the use of comparative advertising in green marketing and provide enlightening suggestions for how firms can promote consumers to buy green products.
Since ancient times, relation-oriented Chinese people have attached great importance to the philosophy that courtesy calls for reciprocity. However, when choosing gifts, we are always caught in a dilemma: give him what I love, or what he wants. By bringing two variables-relationship type and self-construal into the model studying consumers' gift-giving behavior, this paper aims to find out solutions to the problem above from the perspective of the consistency of brand image's influence on the consumers' purchase intention. The results show that: 1) the brand image congruence and the relationship type have significant reciprocal effect on purchase intention, and 2) the interaction between brand image congruence and self-construal has remarkable impact on purchasing intention.
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