Native  advertising, as  the  new  darling  of brand  marketing  communication  in  the digital age, is  widely  used  in  major  new media platforms, driving  in-depth  discussion and research  on  native  advertising. However, the existing  research  on  native  advertising  has problems  such  as  inconsistent concepts, scattered  research  systems, and  inconsistent conclusions  on  advertising effectiveness, which  hinder  the  further development  of  native  advertising research. Combined  with  the  literature  research  methods, and  based  on  the “5W  model” of  the  communication  process, this  paper  clarifies  the  concept  and  types  of  native advertising, summarizes and analyzes the influencing factors of native advertising effectiveness in existing research, outlines the  existing  research  outline, and  discusses  future  research  directions, in  order  to  provide  a  foundation  and  ideas  for  future theoretical research and corporate practice in this field.

In live  streaming commerce, the streamer group is the core factor that drives product's sales performance. This study aims  to understand  how  the  combinations  of streamers  volume, product's  line  breadth, and brand  type  influence  brands'sales performances in live streaming commerce. The study collected panel data on Douyin live streaming platform in an 18-week period from August to December 2020 of 17 luxury brands and 27 non-luxury brands that are representatives of the cosmetics industry, which  includes  261  streamers, 1,658 products and  3,119  live  broadcasts. We  used  a  two-way  fixed  effects  model  with STATA software, and  found  that  streamer  volume  has  a significant  inverted  U-shaped  impact  on brands' live  sales, and  the breadth  of product's  line  has  a  significantly  direct positive  impact  on  brands' live  sales. Besides, product's  line  breadth and brand type moderate the above inverted U-shaped effect.

Based on the warm-glow effect of impure altruism model and clue congruity theory, this study develops a research model to analyze the influence of ethical attributes of corporate social innovation products on customers' purchase intention. In addition, the mediating effect of warm-glow and the moderating effect of product types are verified. The results show that ethical attributes of corporate social innovation products can enhance customers' purchase intentions, and warm-glow plays a mediating role in the positive relationship between the corporate social innovation product's ethical attributes and customers' purchase intentions. Specifically, for hedonic corporate social innovation products, the symbolic ethical attribute (compared with the functional ethical attribute) can stimulate the customer's warm-glow, and thus can enhance the customer's purchase  intention. By contrast, for utilitarian corporate social innovation products, the functional ethical attribute (compared with the symbolic ethical attribute) can stimulate the customer's warm-glow, and thus can enhance the customer's purchase intention. 

Romantic experience is a positive emotional experience that significantly impacts people's lives and consumption behaviors. However, the extant research merely conceptualizes romantic experiences as intimate relationships between lovers, which limits the research on how romantic experiences influence consumers' choices. This study extends the concept beyond romantic love by addressing generalized romantic experiences in a broader sense. Four experiments show that romantic experiences (vs. neutral experiences)increase consumers' preference for self-improvement featured products, even in areas not related to the initial romantic stimuli(Study 1). This greater inclination for self-improvement products ismediated by a heightened sense of meaning in life(Studies 2 and 3). Happiness orientation plays a moderating role in the influence of romantic experience on the meaning in life and preference for self-improvement products(Study 4). Theoretically, this paper expands the concept of romantic experience and enriches the research on the influence of romantic experience on consumer choice and the research on the emotional antecedents of self-improvement products. In practice, this paper provides suggestions and guidance for romantic marketing and the promotion of self-improvement products.

Launching new products to the consumer market is full of challenges. In the new product advertisements, companies have long used colloquial expressions to advocate products. As more and more new products introduce many new features, technical terms which can represent the product's scientific and technological performance have gradually been adopted for product promotion. So how should companies choose between the two types of advertising styles? The present research explores the influences of advertising styles (technical terms and colloquial expressions) on the purchase intentions of different innovative types of products——really new products and incrementally new products. Based on the Linguistic Clues Theory, Construal Level Theory and three experiments, this research proposes and verifies that there is a significant interactive effect between advertising style and product innovation type on consumers' willingness to purchase new products: the advertising style of technical terms could effectively improve consumers' purchase intentions of really new products, and the advertising style of colloquial expressions could effectively improve consumers' purchase intentions of incrementally new products. Processing fluency has a mediating effect in the above-mentioned interaction. In addition, the study also finds the applicability of the above mechanism under the conditions of different product attributes, and excludes the alternative explanations of perceived risk and perceived quality. The conclusion of this paper will provide suggestions for enterprises to improve the effectiveness of new product advertising. 

Ecological governance requires not only the joint efforts of the government and enterprises, but also the internal recognition and active participation of the public. It has attracted the attention of researchers that the emergence of online environmental gamification applications represented by“Ant Forest”which has made positive practical exploration to improve the publie's environmental literacy and to strengthen the consciousness of integration of knowledge and action. How to guide game users to change from online environmental protection game behavior to ofline pro-environmental behavior has become an important issue that needs to be further explored. Based on the theories of norm-activation and self-regulation, we construct a structure model to demonstrate the transformation mechanism from users' online game participation to ofline pro-environmental behavior and the moderating effect of hedonic experience. The research findings show that online environmental-protection games facilitate the transition from online to offline pro-environmental behaviors by initilly enhancing users' knowledge of environment(environmental threat perception), which subsequently activates their sense of moral responsibility(personal norms). However, hedonic experience weakens the positive effect of game participation on users' environmental threat perception and on the pro-environmental behavior. The research reveals and veriffies the potential negative effects of gamification on pro-environmental behavior, which provides a new theoretical research perspective for understanding and improving digital green behavior intervention, and offers useful practical enlightenment for enterprises to improve gamification platforms.

In recent years, China has proposed the construction of a unified national market and the establishment of a new development pattern focused on both domestic and international markets. In this context, the importance of marketing research has become increasingly prominent. Hence, conducting a comprehensive review of academic accomplishments and knowledge landscapes within the realm of marketing in China holds immense significance. It serves as a catalyst for advancing the establishment and growth of marketing disciplines, while also enabling a more effective utilization of academic insights to bolster local marketing practices in China. This paper conducts a literature review and quantitative analysis of marketing articles published in China's premier management journals from 2005 to 2020, focusing on depicting the multidimensional evolutionary trends of research areas, topics, methodologies, and data sources in the field of Chinese marketing. Through a comparative analysis with the development of international marketing research, it illustrates the distinctive features of marketing research in China.

In recent years, the application of AI-based robot services in the hotel industry has been on the rise, attracting widespread attention. However, existing research on how robot services affect consumer satisfaction has presented conflicting conclusions, and the academic community has not yet deeply explored the relationship between robot services in dfferent scenarios and consumer satisfaction from the perspective of asymmetrical impacts. This study mined consumer review data from China's first fully automated robot service hotel from 2018 to 2022, exploring the asymmetrical impact ofhotel robot services on consumer satisfaction in different scenarios based on the three-factor theory and complexity theory. Through dummy variable regression analysis, this paper identified that robot services in the hotel's alternative service scenarios are the basic factors for consumer satisfaction, those in the enhancement service scenarios are performance factors, while those in the innovative service scenariosare motivational factors. Moreover, using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis(fsQCA), this study fur- ther revealed the configurations of robot services in different scenarios leading to high(low)levels of eonsumer satisfaction, further validating the research results of the dummy variable regresion analysis. The study's conclusions enrich the literature on service scenarios and service satisfaction in the field of robot services and provide practical guidance for the hotel industry to reasonably allocate robot services to enhance consumer satisfaction

The globalization of time-honored brands is an important strategy to build a global brand and enhance China's cultural soft power. The unique cultural resources of time-honored brands are conductive to establishing differentiated market positioning and enhancing brand image in the international market. Based on the perspective of intercultural communication, this paper constructs a theoretical model of the globalization of time-honored brands that is evolving in stages. Thecase study based on Tongrentang shows that:(1)In different stages ofbrand globalization, implementing corresponding intercultural communication strategies based on brand cultural positioning is an effective path to gradually realize the globalization of time-honored brands. (2)According to different stages of brand globalization, time-honored brands should adjust the brand cultural positioning, which can be achieved by combining the target customer range, needs, and available cultural resources to upgrade the brand cultural positioning from the functional, experiential to meaningful. (3)The staged strategies for time-honored brands to implement intercultural communication include:amplifying the advantages ofproducts/services to gain brand product recognition in the building stage of brand globalization; bridging national and foreign cultures to establish brand likability in the expanding stage of brand globalization; extending the brand's additional social and cultural value for global consumers to achieve global brand cultural identity in the mature stage of brand globalization. Differentiated intercultural communication strategies at different stages are the key means to promote the phased upgrade of time-honored brands.

A convergent product is a new product that physically integrates the functions of two or more categories into a common product form. Existing literature on convergent products lacks research regarding the degree of functional separation. Therefore, based on the technology acceptance model, the authors explore the impact mechanism of the degree of functional separation on the intention to use. Four studies examine consumers'perceived usefulness and perceived ease-of-use toward convergent products and how these perceptions change with complementarity. The results show that the higher the degree of the product's functional separation, the higher the consumer's perceived usefulness, and the lower the consumer's perceived ease-of-use. Complementarity weakens the effect of functional separation on perceived usefulness, which means for complementary products, the lower the degree of functional separation, the higher the consumer's intention to use. Therefore, enterprises should consider the complementarity while determining the degree of new product's functional separation. This paper fills the gaps in the related fields and has important practical significance for enterprises designing and developing new products.

Cause-related marketing as a form of corporate social responsibility has grown exponentially in the last 40 years. Existing research on cause-related marketing has mainly focused onits effectiveness by exploring the components and advertising factors that influence consumers participation intention, with less attention paid to the donation feedback. The development of digital technology has enabled more and more companies to conduct donation feedback to consumers. Based on social dentity theory and elaboration likelihood model, this article explored the interaction effect of cause-related marketing feedback framing and self-construal, internal mechanism and boundary conditions. With two experimental studies, we found that individual feedback(aggregate feedback)could induce independent (interdependent)consumers more positive attitude toward company. This is because the matching between feedback framing and self-construal could induce higher consumer-company dentification. However, this matching effect was only supported for high cause involvement, but not for low cause involvement. By focusing for the first time on the cause-related marketing's donation feedback, this study develops new research perspective of cause-related marketing and enriches feedback framing's research context and theoretical connotation. This research also offers practical insights to managers on how to design and execute donation feedback communication for cause-related marketing campaign.

Considering the differences of firms' digital capabilities, this paper studies how behavior-based pricing ( BBP ) affects pricing decisions, profits and strategy choices of both firms. We use Hotelling model to construct a two-period pricing model in a competitive market. By comparing prices and profits of both firms, the study reaches the following conclusions: (1) the equilibrium of the second period is jointly affected by the market share in the first period and digital capabilities gap, which leads to three possible equilibriums. Meanwhile, in the equilibrium of the second period, the price for current customers may be lower than that for new customers; (2) when the market share gap in the first period is large, BBP increases the profits of both firms in the second period. However, the profit of firm that shares a larger market in the first period is lower than the firm's competitor in the second period； (3) a pure strategy equilibrium exists, when the digital capability gap is large enough or small enough. Further, when the digital capability gap is large enough, the advantage firm can get new customers, which help it get rid of the prisoner's dilemma brought by BBP and achieve profit growth.

Firms frequently use message prompts to influence consumer decision-making and behavior. However, research on the boundary conditions and mechanisms driving the effects of these prompts remains limited. The present research investigates how perceived self-control and dialectical thinking influence the effectiveness of message sidedness (one-sided vs. two-sided messages) on sustainable behavioral intentions. Across the experiments, we found that two-sided message prompts were more effective for consumers with high self-control. The interaction between message sidedness and self-control was serially mediated by perceived trust towards the message prompts and the platform. Additionally, dialectical thinking enhanced consumers' perceived trust in two-sided message prompts, further boosting sustainable behavioral intentions. These findings contribute to a better understanding of prompt effectiveness and offer practical guidance for firms, platforms, and policymakers on promoting sustainable consumption more effectively.

With the widespread adoption of social media platforms and the rise of independent media accounts, native advertising within social media holds significant commercial value for brand communication and targeted advertising. Inappropriate ad disclosures can trigger consumer concerns about deception and cognitive resistance, leading to negative brand atitudes. This study examines the impact of the recognizability of native ads and the type of publisher on consumer brand attitudes. Research conducted across three experiments demonstrates an interaction effect between ad recognizability and publisher type, with cognitive resistance mediating this interaction and the style of content information acting as a moderator. The findings of this study enrich the literature on native advertising disclosures and offer practical insights for businesses deploying native advertisements on social media platforms.

This research investigates the effect of social crowdingon shape preference and the underlying mechanism thereof. Across five experiments, the research demonstrates that individuals who are socially crowded prefer circular shapes to angular shapes. Such effect is driven by consumers' needs for vitality, specifically, social crowding increases the needs for vitality, which subsequently makes consumers prefer circular shapes as they are related to vitality in consumers' minds. We also examine the moderating role of composition of the crowd, namely the effect of social erowding on shape preference will attenuate for a crowd composed of in-group(vs. out-group)members. This research enriches the literature on social crowding and shape preference in consumption, and provides managerial implications forbrands and products.

This paper investigates that an emerging computerized text analysis technique, word embeddings, can capture cultural and concept change. In this paper, we utilize this technique to quantify temporal dynamics of the concept of happiness between 1979—2021 in China. We first conducted in-depth interviews and thus formed five dimensions that generally represent Chinese people's conception of happiness, including physical need, social support, self-actualization, environment harmony and patriotism. We then used word embeddings to analyze the associations of five dimension with well-being. Results show that the correlation between happiness and physical need declines over time while happiness's correlations with self-actualization and  with patriotism go upward obviously. What's more, individualism (“self-actualization”) and collectivism-oriented (“patriotism”) dimension shows a consistent trend, this means that traditional value centerring on family and country interest has also been preserved at present age. Although the harmonious relationship with natural environment has not gotten enough attention in  general, it tends to go upward these years. By comparing diachronic changes among five dimensions, this research captures the  social  economic  shifts, e.g., the Reform and Opening-up in the end of 1970s, economic reform since 1992, new millennium of 2000, the new era after 2013. Our method further proves to be valid by showing that changes in the embedding track closely with a series of domestic social surveys. Our research demonstrates the powerful utility of computational text analysis and would  facilitate intersection between machine learning and social science.

The development of digital technology has made virtual visual elements prevalent. This study aims to investigate the impact of virtual visual elements on consumers' creativity and their propensity to adopt new products and elucidate the underlying psychological mechanisms through three online experiments and a field experiment. Experiment 1 demonstrated a significant improvement in consumers' performance on a creativity task after exposure to virtual visual elements compared to real ones. Experiment 2 utilized a moderation-based approach to explore the psychological mechanism of this effect. It was found that real visual elements could also enhance consumers' creativity when a nontraditional mindset was activated. However, in the control group, only virtual visual elements positively impacted creativity. Experiment 3 extended the main effect of virtual visual elements on enhancing creativity to consumer decision-making. The results showed that virtual visual elements could significantly enhance consumers' willingness to adopt new products, and the mediating effect of a nontraditional mindset was directly measured and tested. Experiment 4 demonstrated the effect of virtual visual elements on new product adoption in a field setting and the results suggested that viewing virtual(vs. real)visual elements increased real choice of the new product. The present re- search provides important insights into visual design, creativity, and valuable marketing implications for enterprises promoting new products.

 In the context of the“domestic market's great circulation”and the“dual circulation of domestic and foreign markets”, global strategies of Chinese enterprises, especially in the markets along the Belt and Road, have attracted great attention in both industrial and academic fields. Based on the perspective of the Global Marketing Strategy Model, Institutional Theory and Resource-Based Theory, this research targeted Chinese central state-owned enterprises, and used dual-case study to explore their specific paths and mechanisms of brand globalizations in the countries along the Belt and Road. Research questions included the followings:(1) the advantages and challenges of Chinese central state-owned enterprises during the globalization process; (2) the stages of brand globalization; (3) the international marketing capabilities deployed to improve legitimacy and to establish competitive advantages. The conclusions demonstrated that motivated by internal and external factors, brand globalizations of Chinese central state-owned enterprises involved three stages:brand entry, brand differentiation and brand image cultivation. In each stage, enterprises needed to obtain externally cognitive, moral and pragmatic legitimacy respectively. Responsively, their internal resources, from the Chinese government, domestic business networks and their own,   provided strong supports, and three international marketing capabilities, namely percept and integration capability, development and value-added capability, and communication and bonding capability, could be leveraged to strengthen brand legitimacies. The conclusions enrich the theory of brand internationalization, and shed lights especially for emerging-market multi- national enterprises which enterred the developing markets. This research also provides managerial implications on brand globalization strategy for Chinese enterprises. 

Based on the Brand Architecture Strategy Theory, this paper puts forward the concept of brand architecture fitness and proposes the research hypotheses through theoretically analyzing how different brand architecture combinations between the acquiring party and the acquired party of M&A affecting the long-term performance of the acquirer. The empirical test uses the data of Chinese A-share listed companies which complete  100%equity M&A from 2010 to 2016, and establishes a control group based on the A-share listed companies that do not participate in M&A at the same time. With the panel data and multiple empirical analysis method, the results show that the long-term performance of the acquirer is higher when the brand architectures of both sides are inconsistent than that of both are consistent. More specifically, under the consistent situations, the long- term performance with house of brands architecture of both sides of M&A is higher than that with branded house architecture of both sides; while under the inconsistent conditions, no matter what brand architectures the both sides of M&A are, there are no significant differences in the long-term performances after M&A. In addition, there exist heterogeneous effects due to the factors such as brand equity gap between the two sides of M&A. This study extends the research on the brand effects of M&A from the impact of brand architecture characteristics of both sides on the short-term performance of M&A to the influence of the brand architecture fitness of both sides on the long-term performance, which provides valuable guidances for enterprises to better select the M&A target companies and gain higher long-term performances after M&A.

The development of emerging online platforms relies on attracting merchants with market operation experiences and capabilities. Taking the emerging online discount platform as an example, this study uses small and medium-sized merchants in a specific industry (e. g. , consumer electronics industry) as the observation sample, and employs an individual panel fixed effects model combined with Dynamic Capability Theory to explore the wilingness of merchants with high customer operating capability who mainly attract free traffic, and the willingness of merchants with low customer operating capability who mainly attract paid traffic to adopt the emerging online discount platform,  and analyses the boundary conditions that affect the willingness for adoption. The findings suggest that maintaining a competitive advantage and reducing traffic dependency are the main motivations influencing the adoption of emerging online discount platforms by both types of merchants. However, under the moderating effects of brand strength and user viscosity, the adoption of emerging online discount platforms varies among merchants with different traffic sources. This study enriches the research related to emerging online platforms' adoption and sheds new light on merchants' traffic attraction strategies.