Impact of the Exciting Personality Congruence between Brand and Virtual Endorser on Social Media Engagement
Virtual endorser strategy can enhance brand's controllability and plasticity towards endorsers and alleviate the risk of a mismatch between the image of traditional endorsers and brand personality,which has become an effective approach for brands to reach consumers.Although previous literature suggests that the brand-endorser congruence advantage exists,there is still a lack of research focusing on the personality congruence between brands and virtual endorsers.Based on the expectancy violation theory and associative network theory,the current study refines the research approach to the congruence between brands and virtual endorsers from the dimension of exciting personality.It proposes the hypothesis of the nonlinear influence of exciting personality congruence between brands and virtual endorsers on the consumers'social media engagement,along with the moderating hypothesis of product design atypicality.Three empirical studies were conduc-ted to verify our hypotheses.Study 1 conducted a questionnaire survey,and study 2 constructs a negative binomial regression model by crawling real data from foreign social media platforms to jointly examine the nonlinear impact of exciting personal-ity congruence between brands and virtual endorsers on consumers'social media engagement.Study 3 conducted a laboratory study,utilizing Spss for analysis of variance and hierarchical regression analysis,to test the moderating effect of product design atypicality.The results of study 1 indicate that the exciting personality congruence between brands and virtual endorsers exhibits a U-shape relationship with consumer social media engagement.Specifically,when the exciting personality congruence between brands and virtual endorsers is high or low(vs.medium),consumers show a stronger willingness of engagement on the social media platform.Study 2 reconfirms the findings of study 1.The results of study 3 suggest that,the U-shape effect of the excit-ing personality congruence between brands and virtual endorsers on consumer responses only emerges when the endorsed product has an atypical design.However,when the endorsed product has a typical design,the relationship between brands and virtual endorsers exhibits a positive linear trend.Focusing on the frontier research topic of virtual endorsement,the current study enriches the literature on endorsement marketing,consumer social media engagement,and visual marketing.It also expands the application of the expectancy viola-tion theory and associative network theory in the area of endorsement marketing.Meanwhile,the present study provides im-portant reference and enlightenment for brands on how to choose the appropriate virtual endorser for products with different design atypicality to promote consumer social media engagement.
virtual endorserexciting personality congruence between brand and virtual endorsersocial media engagementproduct design atypicalityU-shape relationship
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
