A Study on Influence of Messages and Social Capital on Ewom and Purchase Intention and Considering Mediators in Social Commerce: the Perspective of Consumer Behavior Process Model

Social commerce is getting an emerging trend for doing online business. Users utilize social network sites as a channel for exchanging product usage experience, taking suggestions, and purchasing a product. Firms utilize social networks site as a channel for communicating with customers, strengthening customer relationship, conducting marketing and sales activities. For example, firms usually manage a social brand community on Facebook, especially e-tailers. Literature usually investigates performance outcomes of utilizing social brand communities for e-commerce separately, including continuous usage, purchase intention, and online referral intention. However, we think these outcomes may be happened sequentially and antecedents of these outcomes are distinct based on the consumer behavior process model. We further propose a mediator, i.e., brand attitude, between community usage and purchase intention. We think users have to build brand image before they would like to take further actions, including online referral or purchase. Literature usually focuses on social related factor, such as social identity, social capital, or social influence, but pays little attention on transmitted message in social commerce. Studies explored associations of information and continuous usages usually start from information quality. But, this study considers social and information related factor and proposed content attractiveness as an important antecedent following the perspective of flow theory, instead of information quality. Users may more hardly evaluate information quality than just perceive interests, concerns, or their gaze on messages. For example, messages in a social brand community are short and goal-oriented, so information completeness could only be designed in original e-tailing web site. Subject involvement and vividness increase users’ focused attention and in turn retain users on the social brand communities from the flow theory. From the social view, this study mainly explores friends’ influence on users’ activities and intention following the social capital theory. Literature usually discovers influence of general community members whom users are not really acquainted with. The degree of acquaintance does not receive much attention. Literature usually supposes that users will trust members because of linkage of communities. However, this study proposes that users usually classify their friends and consider their opinion, suggestions and activities based on the degree of friendship, especially in social brand communities of Facebook. Moreover, this study proposed that influence of friends on users’ activities and intention is important and may be moderated by users’ types of self-construal. Egocentric users may not easily and immediately be affected, even their close friends. On the contrary, egocentric users rely on themselves to make decisions related to purchase, community activities, as well as taking others’ experiences and opinions. This study will conduct online surveys for data collection. We will propose theoretical and managerial implications based on results of data analysis.

Project ID:PB10307-0473
External Project ID:MOST103-2410-H182-010