"Viewing Self"or"Viewing the World"?How Consumers'Self-awareness Influences Advertising Effectiveness in the Use of Social Media
Social media applications are regarded as an important part of people's daily life and are gradually becoming an important adver-tising platform for modern enterprises.Whether it is WeChat and Weibo,which provide social communication,or TikTok,which records life,all have penetrated into advertising.However,it is not optimistic that most of the advertisements that companies spend a large amount of money on each year have little effect.Therefore,how to quickly improve the effectiveness of social media advertising has become an urgent problem that enterprises need to solve.The existing literature shows that the advertising effectiveness depends largely on the matching effect between advertising appeal and media scene factors.Considering the differences between social media and traditional media,as well as the diversity of social media itself,in the era of social media,it is crucial to consider the new changes brought about by its situational factors and the impact of these changes on advertising strategy choices.This research suggests that the situational factors of social media have a very important impact,which is the impact of people's self-aware-ness on advertising effectiveness.Self-awareness is a state in which people focus their attention on or away from themselves.In the era of traditional media,people are mostly in a state of subjective self-awareness,but in the era of social media,people may be in a state of objec-tive self-awareness under certain social media or specific use methods.Meanwhile,due to the great convenience provided by intelligent mobile terminals(such as mobile phones)for people to switch between different behaviors,the self-awareness state of consumers brought by social media usage scenarios will inevitably become an important factor affecting advertising effectiveness.To this end,this research selects the advertising appeal strategy widely used in marketing practice,such as other-benefit appeals and self-benefit appeals.On this basis,we explore the matching effect of advertising appeal strategies and self-awareness states and its underlying mechanism in the context of social media.One pretest and three experiments were carried out in our research.The pretest is mainly used to verify the influence of different ways of using social media on people's self-awareness state.If the consumer uses the function of self-presentation,the user will be in the state of objective self-awareness.If the function of viewing the content displayed by others is used,the user is in a state of subjective self-awareness.In study 1,different social media applications were selected to manipulate self-awareness states,and the matching effect between self-aware-ness states and advertising appeals was preliminarily verified.Study 2 manipulated self-awareness states through different ways of using the same social media,and verify the matching effect again and test the mediating role of processing fluency.In study 3,environmental protec-tion advertisement was selected as the experimental material of advertising appeals,and the above matching effect was repeatedly verified.This research shows that different social media and different ways of using the same social media can bring about different self-aware-ness states of consumers:subjective self-awareness or objective self-awareness.And then,the matching of advertising appeal strategy and self-awareness has an impact on advertising effectiveness.Specifically,when consumers are in the state of subjective self-awareness,con-sumer responses toward other-benefit appeals are more positive than self-benefit appeals.However,when consumers are in the state of ob-jective self-awareness,consumer responses toward self-benefit appeals are more favorable than other-benefit appeals.This matching effect is mediated by processing fluency.Advertising effectiveness is better only when the state of self-awareness is matched with advertising appeal.Because a match with subjective self-awareness(objective self-awareness)and other-benefit appeals(self-benefit appeals)improves process-ing fluency,resulting in more positive advertising evaluation and purchase intention.The current research makes important theoretical contributions.Firstly,this research expands the new dimension of social media research.The research on social media has always been a hot topic in academic circles,and many scholars have conducted a series of explorations on the characteristics and phenomena of social media.However,the existing literature has neglected the important factor that leads to the change of individuals'cognitive information processing,which is the state of self-awareness.Second,self-awareness is an important deter-minant of consumer attitude and behavior.However,it is somewhat regrettable that most studies focus on the traditional media background.This research explores the influence of social media usage on consumers'self-awareness and marketing effects,which not only supplements and improves the relevant research on self-awareness,but also deepens people's cognition of self-awareness in the context of social media.Finally,we reveal the matching effect between self-awareness states and advertising appeals and its internal mechanism.According to the influence of self-awareness state on individual information processing,the mediating role of processing fluency is proposed,which also en-riches the research on the internal mechanism.This research also has important practical implications.This research provides operational suggestions for enterprises to improve advertis-ing effectiveness in the context of social media.First of all,in the process of advertising production,advertisers should be aware that in the era of social media,even for the promotion of the same product,the advertising content designed by enterprises needs to be adjusted and modified according to the changes of media scene factors.Secondly,in the process of advertising placement,advertising channel operators should fully consider the changes in individual self-awareness caused by social media scene factors.At the same time,they need to con-stantly insight into the current state of consumers and push corresponding advertising types based on their different self-awareness states.For example,if people are browsing external information,marketers should quickly recognize that the consumer is in a state of subjective self-awareness and issue altruistic advertising messages.On the contrary,if people are browsing information about themselves,companies should choose to publish egoistic advertising information in order to achieve better performance.Finally,the findings of this research can be further applied to public service advertising.By identifying people's different self-awareness states and selecting corresponding altruistic or egoistic appeals,charities can effectively improve the impact of advertising and increase consumers'prosocial behavior.
Social MediaSelf-awarenessAdvertising AppealProcessing Fluency
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