Abstract:

Imitated kinship refers to a kind of relationship including emotional components which is created by some demographic similarities, such as “Laoxiang” and “Xiaoyou”. We explore how imitated kinship do effect on customer purchase intention and examine the moderating effect of front-line employees’ communication style and customer perceived betrayal. Through experimental method, we can draw the conclusions as follows: (1) Imitated kinship will do a positive effect on customer purchase intention by the mediating effect of intimacy. (2) Front-line employees’ communication style will moderate the effects of imitated kinship on customer perceived intimacy: when there is imitated kinship, interaction-oriented style is more conducive to enhance intimacy. (3) The degree and the type of customer perceived betrayal will moderate the effects of imitated kinship on customer repurchase intention: while customers perceive low level betrayal, their repurchase intention will be lower under the condition that there is imitated kinship between customers and front-line employees compared to the condition that there is not imitated kinship between customers and front-line employees. While customers perceive that the betrayal is not related to the front-line employee, customers repurchase intention will be higher under the condition that there is imitated kinship between customers and front-line employees compared to no imitated kinship condition.

Key words: imitated kinship, repurchase intention, intimacy, communication style, perceived betrayal