Researches have shown that encouraging consumers to touch a product can prompt consumers to generate a positive attitude towards the product.  However, consumers’ haptic input when examining a product during product demonstration is often restricted by retailers, salespersons and front-line employees in many offline retail settings.  To date, we know little a- bout whether the usage of haptic -restriction strategies can induce negative marketing consequences. This research conducts four studies, including a field experiment and three lab experiments, to document a novel variety-seeking effect of haptic restrictions.   Previously restricting (versus not restricting) consumers from touching a product induces consumers to conduct variety seeking and options shifting in a subsequent and different situation (Experiments 1-2).  Moreover, this effect is driven by perceived  threats to personal freedom in general (Experiment 3) and is mitigated when consumers' need to elevate the extent of personal freedom is low ( Experiment 4).  This research contributes to the literature of product touch and variety seeking, offering specific implications for offline retailing.

In the era of Mobile Internet, more and more companies provide precise recommendation services based on the locations of consumers.  However, existing studies have not paid enough attention to how place attachment affects consumers' perceptions and acceptances of recommended services.  Applying the communication accommodation theory, from the perspective of consumer's psychological perceptions, our study explores consumer's (with different degrees of place attachment) psychological perceptions and acceptance mechanism of group-based recommendation and individual -based recommendation.  The results show that, the higher the degree of consumer's place attachment is, the better the effect of individual-based recommendation is, and the perceived self-enhancement plays a mediating role in this process.  When the degree of consumer's place attachment is lower, the effect of group-based recommendation is better, and perceived social connection plays a mediating role.

Existing literature have paid little attention to how boundaries affect people's food information processing process and shape people's food consumption preferences.  This paper investigates the effect of boundaries of food information on perceived healthiness, and examines the serial mediating role of the sense of confinement and psychological reactance, as well as the boundary conditions of this effect through 5 experiments.  The results show that: ( 1) boundaries of food infbnnation could reduce people's perceived healthiness (Experiment la, lb and lc) and purchase intentions (Experiment 2) ； (2) a sequential mediating effect demonstrates that food information boundaries could increase people's sense of confinement, which triggers people's psychological reactance and lower people's perceived healthiness (Experiment 4 and 5) ； (3) food safety risk perception moderates the effect of the boundaries of food information on perceived healthiness ( Experiment 3) .  Our research contributes to the literature of boundaries and food consumption, and provides important implications for the packaging design of the food enterprises.

In 2020, “Humblebragging” was popular on social networks and was selected as one of the top ten buzzwords.  However, the existing literature offers little implications of whether humblebragging is an effective brand marketing strategy.  Based on the perspective of the motives of self-presentation (the desire to be liked and respected) , this paper intends to examine the effect of humblebragging advertisement on consumers’ brand attitudes through three sets of experiments.  The results suggest that, there is an interaction effect between the type of product and the type of advertising rhetoric.  That is, when the functional product applies humblebragging advertisement, or the symbolic product applies normal advertisement, consumers' brand attitudes are more positive.  We further reveal that this interaction effect on consumers' brand attitudes is serially mediated by their sincerity perception, feeling of envy, bragging perception and feeling of disgust.  Further implications for designing advertisements are alse discussed.

Image and text complements each other in print advertising, which can effectively improve the advertising effect, especially for the charity public service advertisements.  Based on the construal level theory, this study explores the impact of the matching of the depth of field presentation and advertising information framework of the charity public service advertisements on individuals.  The study found that when individuals are presented with advertisements with shallow depth of field, they have a longer psychological distance and a higher construal level.  The advertising effect of shallow depth of field matching the promotion framework is better； when individuals watch advertisements with deep depth-of-field, their psychological distance is shorter and their construal level is lower.  The advertising effect of deep depth of field matching the defense framework is better.   Individual's expected value of charity plays a mediating role in the matching effect, and the individuals5 degree of career involvement plays a moderating role.  The purpose of this study is to develop better publicity for charitable public service advertisements, to guide the public to pay attention to and participate in charitable public undertakings, and to provide opinions and suggestions for the publicity of charitable public service advertisements.

Enterprises often use affirmative sentence or negative sentence in advertisements to demonstrate the positive or non- negative properties of the products to consumers.  Few studies have compared the differences in consumer responses to these two types of slogans.  Based on the negation bias theory, this paper explored the interaction between brand position and advertising sentence pattern on consumers’ advertising evaluation and attention and its mechanism.  The results of three experiments showed that： for the leader brand, consumers would have a more positive evaluation and pay more attention to the affirmative (vs.negative) slogan ； for the challenger brand, the negative slogan is more effective for the promotion of consumers’ advertising evaluations and attention than the affirmative slogan.  The perceived reliability of the leader brand and the perceived creativity of the challenger brand respectively mediated the affirmative slogan's and negative slogan's positive effect on the two types of brands.  This study enriches the literature on the persuasive effect of sentence pattern and brand position, and provides marketing implications for brand managers on how to choose the appropriate slogans.

Utilizing the word-of-mouth and social influences of key users in the social network, seeding strategies have already been successfully applied to the promotion of new products.  The rising popularity of social media marketing provides marketers with the opportunities to observe and exploit the characteristics of massive social networks, so that better seeding strategies could be implemented.  However, there is limited research on the design of a unifying methodology framework for identifying seeding users and evaluating their values to the diffusion of innovation. Our essay's major contributions are summarized as follows. First, we proposed a basic theoretical framework for the selection of seeding users by identifying key users in the social network.  The process is iterative, in the sense that the quality of diffusion is monitored to dynamically adjust the seeding strategy.  Then, we designed simulation experiments to validate our framework under a variety of circumstances.  We discovered that seeding strategies which utilized group-level central information within a social network are effective in the early stage of the process of the diffusion of new product, and that network structures with high connectivity and low redundancy can facilitate the spread of innovation.  While seeding useis are central in initiating the diffusion, their values diminish marginally as the market saturates.  Finally, we found that social influence mechanisms can significantly affect the performance of new product’s diffusion.

 Based on the money illusion theory, this paper explored the influences of different money clues ( presented by local currency versus foreign currency) on consumer's price-quality judgment.  The exploratory experiment and Experiment I verified that the individual's price-quality judgment tendency was higher when facing foreign money clues compared with when facing domestic money clues.  Experiment II changed the foreign currency type and added a control group on the basis of Experiment I. Laboratory experiments were carried out to test the mediating effect of structural need on the relationship between money clue and price-quality judgment.  Experiment III explored the boundary condition for the existence of this effect, i. e., the conversion task. This study indicated that this effect only existed when individuals did not take the conversion task (i. e., the avoidance strategy) , and that the different effect of money clues on price-quality judgment disappeared when individuals took the conversion tasks (i. e., the calculation strategy) .  This research expands the theoretical framework of money clues and price-quality judgment, and also provides practical guidances for merchants to effectively utilize the ubiquitous money clues in the consumption situation.

The mobile internet enables consumers to switch quickly across multiple scenarios. In this context, this paper explores the mechanism and boundary condition of how the impact of privacy violation further spreads to other seemingly unrelated consumption scenarios. Five experimental studies reveal that privacy violation enhanced consumers' preferences for unique products in subsequent consumptions. The underlying process driving this effect is that consumers perceived their personal boundaries have been invaded when encountering privacy violation and thus sought to rebuild their psychological boundaries by using unique products which symbol invisible boundaries. However, this effect does not exist among consumers with low privacy concerns.

In order to win the favor of local consumers, more and more global brands begin to use local cultural elements in product design or marketing process. When such global brands make mistakes, will consumers ( due to their love for these brands) think the brands are excusable, or will consumers blame the brands and think they are worse? From the perspective of brand mistakes, this study explores the influence of culture mixing on consumers’willingness to forgive, and deeply analyzes its mediating mechanism and possible boundary conditions. Through two experimental studies, it is found that consumers are more likely to forgive cultural mixed global brands than non-cultural mixed global brands, because the application of local cultural elements will narrow the psychological distance between global brands and consumers, and thus trigger their in-group brand preference. However, this effect only exists when the global brand makes competence mistakes. However, when the brand makes moral mistakes, because consumers have higher moral requirements for those who are psychologically close, therefore, compared with non-cultural mixed global brands, consumers are more difficult to forgive cultural mixed brands. This study is the first to explore the impact of culture mixing on consumers, willingness to forgive from the perspective of brand mistakes, which provides a new perspective and direction for culture mixing research, thus further enriching and expanding existing studies on culture mixing. At the same time, this study also provides important guidances and suggestions for corporate’s cultural mixing design and brand crisis management.

Based on the perspective of anticipated happiness, three studies were conducted to confirm the influence of individual's orientation to happiness ( OTH) on purchase type preference, and also verify the mediating role of long-term utility concern. Study 1 found that compared with hedonic OTH, eudemonic OTH can lead consumers to pay more attention to the long utility of products and future self, in turn to enhance the preferences of material products. In addition, purchase preference is manifested not only in the financial cost input to the product ( study 1A) , but also in the time cost input to the product (study IB). This effect is robust even after controlling the purchase objectives ( study 2). However, when experiential products also provide long-term utilities, the effect of OTH on purchase type preference will be weakened ( study 3).

Empowered by new technologies such as artificial intelligence, service robots are increasing rapidly in diverse consumption markets. In fact, the interaction between service robots and consumers is a process of social exchange on the basis of trust. Anthropomorphism is one of the common strategies to increase consumers’ trust and acceptance in diverse service contexts ,but it may trigger some negative effects. This is because consumers have different expectations and needs for the anthropomorphism of service robots in different consumption contexts. Anthropomorphism can be divided into two types: anthropomorphism with human nature traits and with unique human traits, which provides a new idea for satisfying consumers’ diversified trust needs for service robots under different consumption situations. Based on three experiments, we find that under subjective service tasks, consumers will enhance their service satisfaction if the service robot is imbued with human nature traits ( vs. unique human traits) when it’s anthropomorphized externally, and this effect is mediated by emotional trust; however, under objective service tasks, consumers will enhance their service satisfaction if the service robot is imbued with unique human traits (vs. human nature traits) when it's anthropomorphized externally, and this effect is mediated by cognitive trust. The results provide specific guidance for the design of service robots and mainly enrich the literature on service robots and anthropomorphic marketing.

Based on theories of ambiguity aversion and psychological resource depletion, the current research demonstrates the effect of psychological resource depletion on consumers’ ambiguity aversion behaviors, its underlying mechanism and boundary conditions across four studies. In the contexts of brand choice ( Study 1A) , Ellsberg's two-color-ball decision ( Study IB) and price premium ( Study 1C) , we find that psychological resource depletion enhances ambiguity aversion. The effect of psychological resource depletion on ambiguity aversion is mediated by the willingness to process the competing possibilities associated with ambiguity ( Study 2) . When the outcome becomes more ambiguous ( has a wider range of possibilities , Study 3) or consumers have more product knowledge ( require less psychological resources to process ambiguity, Study 4) , the influence of resource depletion on ambiguity aversion strengthens or attenuates.

Based on open systems theory, by analyzing the data of 212 respondents, this paper investigates the impact of channel multiplicity on cross-channel integration, cross-channel conflict, and the firm's performance. The results show that channel multiplicity tends to increase primarily cross-channel integration and unambiguously promotes the firm's performance, whereas channel multiplicity may foster cross-channel conflict and limit the firm's performance. Moreover, the authors also find that cross-channel integration could mitigate cross-channel conflict. The paper finally discusses the theoretical and practical significance of the results and points out some limitations of this present study and directions for future studies.

Online community provides a continual social platform for the vast floating population. On this platform, consumers establish their public images by sharing information, whereby they can perform impression management and achieve their identity. From the perspective of socioecological psychology, this paper explores the joint effect of residential mobility and numerical source status upon information sharing intention, as well as its mechanism and boundary condition. Across four experiments ,this research shows that: ( 1) Residential mobility and numerical source status jointly affect consumers' information sharing intentions. Specifically, individuals with high residential mobility matched with minority source status, will have higher information sharing intention. Meanwhile, individuals with low residential mobility matched with majority source status, will have higher information sharing intention. (2) Perceived uniqueness, not social bonding motivation or self-esteem instability , mediates this joint effect mentioned above. (3) Implicit theories of personality moderate the joint effect of residential mobility and numerical source status on information sharing intention.

Based on social interference theory and the research on anthropomorphic products, this paper explores the impact of social crowding and self-construal on anthropomorphic brand preferences and the underlying mechanisms. Through a field survey and two online experiments, this study finds that consumers with different self-construal respond differently to anthropomorphic brands when they are confronted with social crowding. Specifically, when consumers hold independent self-construal, social crowding leads to a low sense of control, which hinders the realization of important goals, and thus decreasing consumers' preferences for anthropomorphic brands. However, when consumers hold dependent self - construal, social crowding has a positive effect on anthropomorphic brands preference by stimulating social warmth perception. The conclusion of this study provides guidance for anthropomorphic brand's optimization of publicity strategy.

Since the General Office of the State Council of the People's Republic of China published "The opinions on promoting interaction between online and offline & rapidly developing transformation and upgrading of commercial circulation" in 2015, the marketing field's attention has soared on omni - channel marketing, making omni - channel marketing research become one of the hot topics in the field of marketing research in recent years. Based on "Research on Omni-Channel Marketing in the Mobile Internet Age" funded by the Key Project of National Natural Science Foundation of China, this article discusses three major issues including platform competition and management, channel positioning and coordination, customer migration and privacy.  On the basis of that, the authors provide intriguing directions for future omni-channel marketing research.

Happiness is the eternal pursuit of human beings, and consumption is the primary way for modem people to obtain happiness. Although the popularity of consumer happiness research continued to rise, a relatively independent and complete theoretical system has not formed. Currently, the research topics within this field is “ many but scattered”. To facilitate the development of this field, this study proposes a three-dimensional theoretical framework involving the research paradigm, research stance and research theme, and explains it based on a selective review. Finally, based on this framework, eight future research topics in this field are proposed, including consumer eudaimonic well-being and consumer unhappiness which belong to the research paradigm dimension, well-being marketing strategy and macro study of consumer happiness which belong to the research stance dimension, time spending and consumer happiness, Chinese and subcultural consumer happiness, digital technology and elder consumer happiness, as well as outcomes of consumer happiness which belong to the research theme dimension.

The present paper proposes that brand ( corporate or product) can additionally perform the spiritual and cultural function, in addition to its traditional material function.  So, the works involved with brand-building are defined as building not only a material but also a spiritual civilization of the country.  Therefore, brand research related knowledge should be applied at both the macro-level of public governance policies and the micro-level of enterprise management.  Motivated by the goal of building China a strong modem economy in the new era, this paper proposes three brand-related strategies to help Chinese brands to obtain leadership in the world.  The proposed three brand-related strategies include enhancing the brand's function of spiritual and cultural stimulation, applying the brand's leveraging function to economy's quality development, and valuing brand's avatar marketing.  The author discusses the general conclusions, theoretical contributions, and implications at the macro level of public policy and micro level of enterprise management.

The online product review social network is a social network with product information and reviews, such as Dou- ban. com. In online product review social network, consumers can not only post product reviews, but also browse friends’ product reviews. Hence, their product purchasing decisions are under the influence of word -of- mouth ( WOM). This paper proposes two novel social influence measures, namely the frequency measure and the frequency-rating measure. Both measures include the structural characteristics of one's network. The former considers actual interaction frequency between consumers f and the latter further considers the valence of WOM. This paper employs two benchmarks from literature, namely the relationship measure and the network exposure measure. The former measures one's social influence by the number of users among his friends, and the latter refers to the proportion of users among his friends. We empirically compare the four measures. The results indicate the frequency-rating measure has the best criterion validity, which is not only in line with the relationship between the social influence and purchasing behavior as suggested by theories of the consumer behavior, but also has better statistical significance and model fit. Hence, it can be used to measure the social impact of consumers, and businesses can also use it to identify susceptible consumers. It provides a more accurate measure for verifying the effect of social influence on consumer purchase.