Understanding Chinese Consumers’ Livestreaming Impulsive Buying: An Stimulus-Organism-Response Perspective and the Mediating Role of Emotions and Zhong Yong Tendency

Abstract

We built a livestreaming impulsive buying model based on stimulus-organism-response (SOR) theory, and we explored the impact of atmospheric cues (ACELS) and sales promotion (SPELS) on impulsive buying (IBI) based on emotions (EOC) and Zhong Yong tendency (ZYT) of online consumers. Combined with holistic orientation, perspective integration, and harmony maintenance, ZYT is a cognitive process involving individual events. We gathered 478 samples using a questionnaire to test the proposed research model. The empirical findings show that as the stimuli in the livestreaming environment, ACELS and SPELS during livestreaming greatly boost EOC while significantly constraining consumers’ ZYT. Among online consumers, positive EOC promotes IBI, whereas ZYT dampens it. In addition, EOC and ZYT mediate the relationship between stimulus factors and response factors in parallel, resulting in four model mediation paths. By incorporating the SOR model, this study provides theoretical underpinnings for the role of cognitive processing in impulsive purchases, as well as useful guidance for e-commerce platforms and streamers to effectively understand Chinese consumers’ purchase behavior, which benefits the development of effective promotion strategies and the creation of powerful marketing tools.

Exploring Factors Affecting Consumer’s Impulse Buying Behavior in Live-Streaming Shopping: An Interactive Research Based Upon SOR Model

“…Sales promotion is another important cue of live streaming, offering consumers an incentive to purchase various products (H. Gao et al, 2022;. Past studies have drawn the same conclusion that sales promotion is an effective instrument that induces consumers' purchase and re-purchase intention (Bandyopadhyay et al, 2021;Liao et al, 2010).…”

“…Zhu et al, 2019). Price discounts could also be one of the appealing advantages of live streaming (H. Gao et al, 2022). However, an impulse might not be satisfied directly through the sales promotion, as consumers' phycological state might affect also (Sinha & Verma, 2020).…”

“…Second, the S-O-R model was applied to investigate consumers’ live-streaming impulse buying, as its advantage in providing a holistic approach to integrating various external stimuli related to impulse buying (Chan et al, 2017; C. C. Chen & Yao, 2018; H. Gao et al, 2022; Lou et al, 2022).…”

“…Ma, 2021), and become a niche option for exploiting consumers' ''see-now-buy-now'' impulse (Lo et al, 2022). Live streaming has emerged as a critical driver for economic and social development, and has further been expanded (Zhang, Cheng, et al, 2022), particularly in the Chinese market, as the social and economic depression caused by the COVID-19 epidemic (H. Gao et al, 2022;M. Li et al, 2022).…”

A mixed study on the “wow” of impulse purchase on Instagram: insights from Gen-Z in a collectivistic environment

“…The significance of the stimulus–organism–response (SOR) framework is primarily attributable to its thorough consideration of the emotional, cognitive and affective processes that people go through when debating whether to embrace or oppose a specific behaviour (Gao et al , 2022). Furthermore, a few studies adopted the SOR framework to evaluate online impulse purchases (Herzallah et al , 2022; Ric and Benazić, 2022).…”