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Consumers engage in word-of-mouth pervasively, and strategies such as different endorsement types are commonly used to facilitate word-of-mouth diffusion. Prior work on endorsement has highlighted the advantage of the majority (e.g., everyone likes it) in persuasion so that companies usually use it to shape consumers' preference, but is the majority endorsement more effective than the minority endorsement (e.g., I personally like it)? This research demonstrates that the persuasiveness of majority or minority endorsement depends on the stages of the consumer decision journey. Minority endorsement can be more influential than majority endorsement in the early stage of the consumer decision journey. This paper theorizes and demonstrates that this effect occurs because minority endorsement emphasizes differentiation from the group and does not have any conformity pressure, which could satisfy consumers' pronounced need for decision autonomy in the early stage.In contrast, majority endorsement is more effective in the late stage because consumers regard it as social proof and can better meet consumers' salient need for decision control. These findings identify psychological needs in the consumer decision journey, contribute to the research on social influence, and provide managerial insights for marketers on when and how to adopt different strategies to influence consumers.

With the development of mobile Internet technology, firms need to complete the entire process of consumer targeting, ad content generation, and ad display in a very short time window. Therefore, computational advertising, such as native ads on social media platforms, has become the mainstream of online advertising with its automation and personalization features. However, computational advertising faces some problems when using artificial intelligence technology to generate content. First, the images should have a significant enough impact on consumers and be easy to adjust to save computational power at the same time; second, the iteration of the computational advertising system relies on consumer behaviors or advertising effectiveness, and firms need to learn the relationship between ad design and consumer behaviors. Under the above two problems, this paper selects visual distance as the main variable, and images can be adjusted by cropping to save computational power. This paper incorporates image design and ad effectiveness metrics into the construal level theory framework, under which the effectiveness metrics can be quickly determined. Following previous studies, we use click-through rate (CTR) to represent the early stage of the sales funnel and a higher construal level and CVR (conversion rate) to represent the later stage of the sales funnel and a lower construal level. Therefore, visually distant images bring distant psychological distance or higher construal level, which can get higher CTR; visually proximate images bring near psychological distance or lower construal level, which can bring higher CVR. These findings suggest that firms can improve the efficiency of their advertising systems and gain more revenue by understanding consumer psychological states.