Purpose
With the popularity of social media and, recently, live streaming, internet celebrity endorsements have become a prevalent approach to content marketing for e-commerce sellers. Despite the widespread use of social media and online communities, empirical studies investigating the economic value of user-generated content (UGC) and marketer-generated content (MGC) still lag behind. The purpose of this paper is to contribute both theoretically and practically to capture both first-order effects and second-order effects of internet celebrity endorsements on marketing outcomes in an e-commerce context.
Design/methodology/approach
This study conducts a cross-sectional regression to evaluate the economic value of internet celebrity endorsement, and a panel vector autoregressive model is adopted to examine the relationship between celebrities’ and consumers’ content marketing behaviors and e-commerce sales performance. The authors also adopt look-ahead propensity-score matching technique to correct for selection bias.
Findings
The empirical results show that the content generation efforts of marketers and the interaction behaviors between marketers and consumers will significantly influence the e-commerce sales, which refers to the first-order effects of internet celebrity endorsement. Moreover, interactions within the fan community exert second-order effects of content marketing on sales performance.
Originality/value
This paper provides new insights for e-commerce retailers to evaluate the economic values of internet celebrity endorsement, a new content marketing practice in e-commerce platform.
Abstract. With the rapid development and widespread popularity of smart phone devices, location-based social networking service (LBSNS) creates an era of GeoLife2.0 where people can share life experiences and connect to each other with their location histories. Previous academic studies have also realized the crucial role of location and social network on mobile marketing. However, many of them have been conceptual work using structural equation modeling, and the effects of these two factors are never considered at the same time. In our study, mobile marketing is exemplified as a time-limited, group-based "two for the price of one when you get a friend to buy together" promotion campaign advertised via mobile devices. Field experiment was conducted to explore the influence of location and social network on consumers' decision to accept mobile promotions. We then conducted follow-up surveys that revealed users' personality features and psychological states as supporting materials to explain our field experiment observations.
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