The Effects of Emoji on Influencer Advertising and Temporal Orientation on Purchase Intentions Keywords: Influencer Advertising, Emoji, Temporal Orientation, Construal Level

Abstract

Introduction. Digital advertising yields more than 100 billion dollars in the year 2018 in the U.S. (Maloy, 2018). Contemporary digital advirtisng exibits unprecedented growth of influencer marketing on social media by grabing maximum consumers' attention through high-impact conversations about brands or products (Traackr, 2019). In social media promotion, marketers prefer to use influencer-generated content than brand-generated content because of its prevailing reliability among consumers (Traackr, 2019). Despite many studies investigated the effects of influencer-generated contents on digital advertising (Kim, Spiller, & Hettche, 2015), little examined the role of emoji used in influencers' generated contents on consumer responses. An emoji refers to an image representing facial expressions, objects, or numbers that is used as a language in online communication (Grabowski, 2016). Previous studies mainly focused on the emotional valence caused by emoji while failed to consider consumers' emoji elicited emotional arousal level (Das, Wiener, & Kareklas, 2019). Gorn, Pham, and Sin (2001) found that the emotional arousal level influences ad evaluation more than emotional valence. Meanwhile, researchers suggest that temporal orientation-individuals' differences in their cognitive focus on either the present or future-may interact with their emotional valence or arousal level and influence subsequenct consumption behaviors (Bergadaa, 1990; Mogilner, Adker, & Kamvar, 2012). Accordingly, this study is to examine the effects of emoji arousal level as well as its interaction effect with consumers' chronic temporal orientation on their purchase intentions toward an influencer-advertised product.Literature Review. Social media marketers, including brands and influencers, usually use emojis in their commercial/content (Das et al., 2019). To date, research in marketing context mostly related to the effects of absent versus present emojis (Das et al., 2019; Li et al., 2018). Das et al. (2019) found that positive (vs. absent) emojis in brand-generated tweets increased consumers' purchase intentions and this effect was mediated by a positive emotion. However, no research has ever investigated the effct of emoji elicited emotional arousal level on consumers' responses of digitial advertising. Given the nature of marketing communication, this study focused on the emojis that convey positive emotions. Prior research suggested that emotional arousal level is positively related to behavior intention, such as repurchase intention and positive word-of-mouth (Yuksel & Yuksel, 2007). Wu, Lee, Fu, and Wang (2013) proposed that a well-designed online webstie would lead to a higher level of consumers' emotional arousal and thus in turn positively influences their purchase intentions. Therefore, a high (vs. low) arousal level caused by emoji will lead to greater purchase intentions (H1).According to the construal level theory (CLT, Trope & Liberman, 2010), higher arousal levels were 2020 Proceedings