Влияние маркетинга в социальных сетях на импульсивные намерения совершить покупку: на примере WeChat

1.1. Background and motivation
With the development of Web2.0 and mobile Internet technologies, social media has become more and more powerful, and information is becoming more and more abundant, so it has developed into the main channel for consumers to obtain information. The traditional marketing methods of enterprises cannot meet enterprise development needs under the new situation, and it is difficult for enterprises to occupy a favorable position in fierce market competition. Especially since 2020, due to the global outbreak of COVID-19, people have to limit their travel range and avoid exposure to scenes with high crowd density. These restrictive factors make companies more dependent on internet communications, including, social media marketing. Therefore, the close integration of social media marketing and e-commerce is still an essential task for many B2C and B2B companies. In addition, some traditional industries (agriculture, manufacturing) have also focused on the “Internet +” model in recent years, hoping to use social media marketing to give products a greater degree of exposure and stimulate consumers’ willingness to buy ( Du, 2016).
The combination of social media marketing and e-commerce provides consumers with a new shopping environment and influences consumers’ decision-making methods. It also provides a new experimental environment for the study of consumer behavior. Consumers’ impulse buying intention is a research hot point (Xiong & Jing, 2010). Impulse buying is common in consumer buying activities, and some products sold through impulse buying even account for 80% of total sales (Abrahams, 1997), and the sales performance of new products is often achieved through impulse buying as well(Sfiligoj, 1996). Consumers in a complex, virtual network environment are more prone to impulse buying (Kacen & Lee, 2002). However. as there is no physical
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interaction in the transaction process under the network environment, this makes the research of consumer behavior rather complicated (Mukherjee & Nath 2007). Moreover, there is very little research on these two factors in China, so the formation mechanism of impulsive purchase intention in the social media marketing environment is still under discussion.
This study takes the characteristics of social media marketing and the impulsivity trait of consumers as independent variables and explores the influencing factors that affect impulsive purchase intention. This research uses the structural equation model as a tool and Wechat users as the research objects to study the impact between social media marketing and impulse buying intentions in the Chinese market.
1.2. Research gap
The strong attributes of acquaintances society (Fei, 2008) of Chinese social media users and general reliance on the internal trading system of social media platforms may cause some conclusions from foreign research to be unsuitable for Chinese consumers. This has also been confirmed in recent years: Bain(2017) believes that China is leading the trend in all aspects of impulsive consumption. “Almost half of the Chinese consumers purchase goods that exceed their ability to pay, and about 40% are excessive shoppers who make impulsive purchases more than once a week. Chinese consumers are more prominent in all aspects of impulse buying than consumers in other regions.” (Bain, 2017). However, the research of Chinese researchers on the impulsive purchase intention of consumers in their home country and even the marketing research is not very in-depth. “We understand the behavior of American consumers better than that of Chinese consumers.” (Yue, 2005, P. 2). Research on Chinese social media marketing as an external variable in consumer research is even rarer.
With the rapid development of the market economy, the consumption level of the Chinese people has increased significantly. The rapid development of Internet 2

technology has made social media a popular marketing channel in China. Therefore, Chinese researchers began to turn their attention to the domestic market. At present, many Chinese scholars have conducted research on social media marketing and consumers’ purchase intention, but they have not made the distinction between impulse purchase intentions. Researchers such as Dodds believe that purchase intention refers to the subjective probability or possibility of consumers buying a certain product; Mullet believes that consumers’ attitudes towards a certain product or brand, coupled with the effects of external factors, constitute consumers’ purchase intentions. Purchase intentions can be regarded as consumers’ subjective tendency to choose a particular product, and it has been proven to be used as a predictive consumption. An important indicator of behavior. at the same time, Rook’s definition of impulse purchase intention is a sudden, powerful, persistent willingness to purchase a certain product immediately. Consumers’ impulsive buying intentions have been confirmed to be positively correlated with impulsive buying behaviors. Consumers’ impulsivity traits and self-control will also have an impact (Xiong &Jing, 2010). Impulsive purchase intentions often arise suddenly and need to be satisfied immediately. Therefore, there is a clear difference between purchase intention and impulse purchase intention. Because purchase desire is not defined in terms of intensity and time limit, impulse purchase intention is a special purchase intention. However, most Chinese researchers only focus on purchase intention but not impulse purchase intention. Some researchers did not distinguish between them during the research so that they used the wrong scale when studying impulse purchase intention. This research will focus on research on impulse buying intentions to supplement the shortage of social media marketing research.
In addition, not many Chinese researchers have studied the relationship between Chinese social media marketing and impulse buying intentions. They tend to focus on social e-commerce in the Chinese market rather than social media marketing itself, so when looking for influencing factors, they will use marketing elements and network quality as external stimuli. These have little to do with the characteristics of social media itself. Social e-commerce is defined as a business model that uses social media
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platforms to promote sales through communication and interaction between consumers and enterprises (Qin , 2015). Social e-commerce is the use of social media to carry out trading activities(Weaver et al., 2011). It can be composed of social media and e-commerce environment (Ge, 2018). However, the operation and maintenance of the social media environment and the e-commerce environment are two different tasks, so deeper research is needed. This research will focus on the research of the social media marketing environment without considering the elements of the e-commerce environment and use Wechat as a research case to fill the research shortage, given that Wechat is the most representative social media in China.
1.3. Research questions
Based on previous related research, we found that most scholars have studied the relationship between social media stimulus, consumer perception, impulsive buying characteristics, and impulsive buying intention. Therefore, this study will explore the three characteristics of social media marketing without considering the e-commerce environment: entertainment, information, and interaction. In order to ensure the fit of the final model with Chinese consumers, we also added the consumer impulsivity trait as an independent variable, in view of the fact that in the past, researchers mostly used impulse buying tendency as a measure of impulse buying characteristics. This study will use the prevention focus in the regulatory focus theory in further explore the self-control ability of Chinese consumers in the face of stimuli. Regulatory focus theory is more suitable for identifying genuine impulse purchasers than impulse buying propensity (Jing & Xiong, 2010). In addition, this study will use emotion as a direct inducement to fill in the gaps in related fields by consumer perception that is not studied by most scholars. In fact, social media in the Chinese market can be divided into forum communities, blogs, podcasts, and communication software. This study will use Wechat, an instant messaging software, as the research object because it
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has the largest and most complex user group, and Wechat is very representative in social e-commerce. because of its powerful built-in payment functions
The research goal of this paper is to explore how the characteristics of social media marketing in the Chinese market stimulate consumers to produce impulsive purchase intentions.
In order to achieve this research goal, we listed the following research questions and decided to use quantitative analysis to test them.
Research questions:
1. How the features of Wechat marketing stimulate Chinese consumers’ impulsive purchase intentions?
2. How consumer emotions caused by Wechat marketing affect the generation of impulsive purchase intentions?
Thus, the goal of the research is to develop the model of social media marketing influence on the consumer impulsive purchase intention.
The research objectives are thus as follows:
1. To identify key factors of the social media marketing that stimulate
consumers to make impulsive purchase intention on Wechat.
2. To identify consumer emotional factors that stimulate social media marketing
in Wechat, and verify whether these factors affect the generation of impulse purchase intentions.
3. To identify the personal characteristic factors of Wechat users that have an impact on consumers’ impulse purchase intentions.
The paper structure:
This paper contains of six parts. The first part is an introduction. This part contains the background and relevance of the research, research motivation, research gap, research goals, and problems. The second part is to explain the theoretical support of the research and define the variables in the model. The third part is an overview of social media marketing and an overview of Wechat marketing. The fourth part is the formation of the conceptual framework and the hypothesis and describes the experimental design and the collection of the questionnaire. The fifth part is the
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data analysis and hypothesis verification. The last part is the conclusion, contribution, limitations, and further development of this article.