Prior research has mainly applied Baron & Kenny’s (1986) procedures of causal step regression in mediation tests. However, in recent years many researchers have questioned the rationality and reliability of Baron & Kenny’s procedures. Based on this background, this paper summarized the most recent mediation test procedure and Bootstrap method, and elaborated principle, procedure and offers a step-by-step instruction for data analysis using Bootstrap. We not only introduce the simple mediation test, but also elaborate the rationales and methods for several complex mediation models such as mediated moderation, moderated mediation, multiple mediators, and serial multiple mediators, including steps of performing the bootstrap analysis with SPSS software, data analysis and results reports. The paper will provide effective, scientific and convenient guidance for domestic scholar.

Luxurious brands consumption in China is featured by clear conspicuous purposes. This research investigated the phenomenon from the indigenous perspective of social face consciousness. Drawing on Ho’s (1976) framework of gaining versus losing face dynamics, the authors broke down the construct of face consciousness into two dimensions of “desire to gain face” and “fear of losing face”, and developed measurement scales for them. The two scales were then used to examine their effect on conspicuous luxurious brand consumption behavior and found both of them had unique contribution in explaining why Chinese consumers buy luxurious brands.

This research explores how product type (hedonic product and utilitarian product) and reward type (hedonic gift and utilitarian gift) influence customer referral likelihood in referral reward program. The results show as following. Firstly, product type has significant influences on referral likelihood. Compared with utilitarian product, customers are more likely to make referrals when consumed hedonic product. Secondly, product type and reward type have significant interactions to referral likelihood. When rewarded hedonic gift, customers who consumed hedonic product have great willing to make referrals, however, when rewarded utilitarian gift, customer who consumed utilitarian product have great willing to make referrals. Finally, the research offers some marketing implications to the managers.

The new media has now become the topic of the day. It has revealed new possibilities for the firms to market their brands. One of the most interesting ways of brand promotion is brand personification, which refers to a multi-dimensional firm effort to make their brands perceived by the consumers as human-being rather than business entity. Up till now, the concept of brand personification is contested. The goal of this paper is two-fold: what is brand personification, and what should the firms do. This study adopts grounded theory, which is ideal for determining new concepts. The researcher conducted 57 in-depth interviews, combined with a pre-study using data from online forums and official brand websites to form the conceptual framework of brand personification. The result of the study coincides with social presence theory. This paper also provides guideline for firms to conduct brand personification.

Based on the psychological compensation mechanism of consumer behavior, the current research examines how social comparison in ability domain influences people’s conspicuous consumption, and explores the possible interventions. Past research regarded conspicuous consumption as a way of signaling social-economic status, which often derived from wealth comparison. Our research proposes that besides wealth comparison, comparison in consumption unrelated domains would also lead to conspicuous consumption. In this mechanism, conspicuous consumption is a way to compensate for the self threat resulted from upward comparison. 2 studies were conducted to confirm our hypothesis. Study 1 indicates that consumers are more likely to spend on conspicuous items after comparing their own academic performance to those better counterparts. Study 2 replicates the result of study 1 using a more general conspicuous consumption measure. Furthermore, we found that the impact of ability comparison on conspicuous consumption diminished if people engaged in a prior self affirmation.

Impulse buying has been the focus of attention in the marketing. With the rise of online shopping, online impulse buying phenomenon becomes increasingly serious. The relevant literature is rarely in an online environment, the impulse buying behavior discussed. This paper explores the impact of the type of product and time pressure on consumer online impulse buying intention; this is a relatively new issue in the domestic marketing academics. In this study, the experimental method was adopted to explore the impact of consumer online impulse buying tendencies, the departure from the type of product and the time pressure. The results show that low-involvement emotional products stimulate consumer online impulse buying tendencies. At the same time, there is an interaction effect between time pressure and product type, that is, under the influence of time pressure, low-involvement emotional products to enhance the consumer online impulse buying tendency is more significant.

The recent advance of neuroscience technology has lead individual behavior research to an age of “Mind Reading”. Benefiting from this, researchers now can decode the hidden neural mechanism underlying consumer behavior and develop marketing technique on the basis of these findings, which gives rise to a new discipline--Neuromarketing. This article reviews findings of neuroscience research on human’s affective and cognitive systems, and discusses the promises and pitfalls of Neuromarketing.

With the development of video websites, watching online videos have become a part of people’s life. Danmaku has improved users' video-watching experience and stickiness. However, the impact of Danmaku on video has been unknown in both the industry and academia.
Using Danmaku data of Chinese film on Bilibili website, this paper analyses the impact of Danmaku volume and emotional intensity on Video Popularity, along with the moderating effects of the number of fans and total videos of the video uploader. This study finds that the Danmaku volume and emotional intensity exert a positive impact on video popularity. The impact of Danmaku volume on video popularity is moderated negatively by the number of fans and total videos of the video uploader such that the positive effect is weaker when the number of fans and total videos of the video uploader are higher. Nevertheless, the number of fans and total videos of the video uploader cannot moderate the impact of Danmaku emotional intensity on video popularity significantly. This paper helps managers of Danmaku video websites understand the user participation and enriches the research on the relationship between Danmaku and video popularity. The impulse response analysis further shows that the emotional intensity of Danmaku has a faster effect on the popularity of video, while the number of Danmaku has a slower effect on video popularity. Variance decomposition results show that video popularity is largely affected by its own, and the number of collections and coins are also mainly affected by video popularity. In addition, the variance decomposition results also show that the influence of emotional intensity of Danmaku on the video popularity is greater than that of the number of Danmaku on video popularity.

This paper identified the concept of online promotion framing and classified it into negative promotion framing (NPF) and positive promotion framing (PPF) based on framing theory.  We found that the influence of NPF on consumers’ online buying intention was more powerful than that of PPF. The result showed that regulatory focus and product price moderated the effect of online promotion framing. The results are as follows. Compared with NPF, PPF has more influence on Promotion-Focus-Oriented Consumers’ online buying intentions. While compared with PPF, NPF has more influence on Prevention-Focus-Oriented Consumers’ online buying intentions. As to low-priced products, NPF has more influence on consumers’ online buying intention than that of PPF. However, the effect of online promotion framing is not significant for high-priced products.

This research investigates the influence of uppercase vs. lowercase lettering logos on perceptions of the brand. Study1 demonstrates that although logos with lower case lettering brand name have an unfavorable influence on brand authority perception, they have a favorable influence on perceived brand friendliness. The former influence is tied to the logo’s perceived potency, while the later influence is tied to its perceived activeness. Study2 demonstrates a fit effect between products (or services) characteristics and logo associations. Specifically, upper case lettering logos are perceived to be more appropriate for products (or services) with high authority, while logos with lower case lettering brand name are perceived to be more appropriate for products (or services) that should be close and friendly to people. In addition, the findings of Study3 reveals that brands with high authority incline towards upper case lettering logos, while brands with high friendly characteristics are more likely to adopt lower case lettering logos.

As rapid development of social media, its dark sides have appeared. The social media addiction is an example. Based Uses and Gratifications Theory, this article explores the symptoms of weibo addiction and its formation mechanism by netnography. The results showed that: (1) some weibo users have the symptoms of addictive behaviors, such as withdrawal, loss of control, and life problems; (2) narcissism has an important role in the process of weibo addiction, which would have a stronger effect on content generator than content consumer; (3) some weibo users get addicted for relaxing anxiety, however, they get more anxious because of addiction; (4) The reviews have two sides. On one hand, the reviews are one kind of feedback of weibo posting, which satisfied the social needs, on the other hand, a Storytelling System is made up of the post and its reviews, which some weibo users become more dependence.

This paper studies the different impacts of two discount frames, “Off” and “Zhe”, on consumers’ perceived value. We adopt the regulatory fit theory to elucidate the discount framing effect. In study 1, regulatory focus is manipulated through activating participants “ideal self” or “actual self”. We found that “Off” is perceived of higher value for participants with a promotion focus while “Zhe” is perceived of higher value for those with a prevention focus. In study 2, participants are primed with different regulatory goals. We found similar results under high-depth promotion. Under low-depth promotion, we found that “Off” is perceived to provide more value than “Zhe”. In study 3, we measured participants’ regulatory tendency and examined the frames (i.e., “Off” and “Zhe”) stated in absolute values and percentages simultaneously. We found that the fit between regulatory focuses and discount frames only held when discounts were stated in percentages. When stated in absolute values, “Off” was perceived of higher value than “Zhe”. Finally, marketing implications, limitations, and future studies are discussed.

The authors develop a research model to test the effects of three psychological factors( customer involvement, customer psychological empowerment and customer psychological ownership) on customer engagement, and the impact of customer engagement on customer loyalty. The results show that customer involvement and customer psychological ownership are positively related to customer engagement; however, customer psychological empowerment affects customer engagement indirectly. Customer engagement has direct and positive effect on customer loyalty.

With multi-national corporations’ development, the brand scandal of a company could spill over to different countries. Do consumers from different culture have different responses to a brand scandal? Based on the self-construal theory, this paper investigates the cross-culture difference of brand negative spillover effect. A cross-culture experiment and a priming experiment have been adopted, the results show that consumers from eastern countries (interdependent self-construal consumers) have bigger negative spillover effect than consumers from western countries( independent self-construal consumers). This is because interdependent self-construal consumers are inclined to adopt holistic thinking when facing other brands’ scandals; while independent self-construal consumers are inclined to adopt analytic thinking.

Sales promotion is a kind of temporary and transient activity in nature. Only provided with a certain restriction can promotions have a positive effect on sales. Qualitative and quantitative studies provide evidences that quantity-limited promotion is more effective than time-limited promotion in influencing consumers’ purchase intentions because of consumer competition, but only when the promotion is organized in a high level of perceived accessibility of purchase opportunity. When a promotion is organized in the condition that consumers perceived the purchase opportunity in a low level of accessibility, consumers would react more positive to time-limited promotion than quantity-limited. In those situations, time-limited promotion is more effective than quantity-limited promotion because consumers perceive higher uncertainty of promotion opportunity in quantity-limited promotion. Moreover, the interaction between types of purchase restrictions and perceived accessibility of purchase opportunity is moderated by consumers’ cognitive closure need.

Based on 4 empirical study, the authors examine the role of online review’s tactile cues in consumer’s purchase intention. Specially, by analyzing the data from taobao, study 1 found that online review’s tactile cues can significantly affect the consumer’s perception of review usefulness; Study 2 further indicated participants in positive online review’s tactile cues group(vs no tactile cues group) report significant higher scores in purchase intention and participants in negative online review’s tactile cues group(vs no tactile cues group) report significant lower scores in purchase intention; The authors focus 2 types of tactile cues in study 3 and find that holistic tactile cues is more effective than concrete tactile cues in increasing purchase intention under search product and concrete tactile cues is more effective than holistic tactile cues in increasing purchase intention under experience product; In study 4,the authors further explore the boundary condition of these effect and predict that temporal distance can disturb the effect by shift consumer’s nature focus.

Micro blog becomes an important tool of social marketing，challenging companies’ consumer-brand relationship management. Based on grounded theory，66 representative companies’ posts in Sina are collected，with 1395 company posts and 5959 following posts. A influence mechanism model of company micro blog  interaction tactics on consumer-brand relationship is proposed，then the saturation level of this mechanism is tested. Results show that 1) Companies adopt two types of tactics in micro blog interaction: social interaction and task-oriented interaction; 2) Micro blog interaction arises consumer emotional response and cognition toward specific brand and eventually influences consumer-brand relationship. Consumer emotional response includes pleasure and arousal, brand cognition includes perceived quality, perceived relatedness with companies and  brand resonance; 3) The influence mechanism differs among different consumer knowledge level, industry and brand awareness.