A Literature Review and Prospects of Sharing of Marketing Information: Based on the Perspective of Emotions

Li Hong; Liu Feifei

doi:doi:10.16538/j.cnki.fem.2018.09.011

Summary

As the consumer cost of shar information is reduced, the content and quality of consumer-generated marketing information become increasingly difficult to control. How to induce consumers to share the marketing information generated by the company in favor of brand images has become a significant problem that companies need to solve in the era of new media. As an individual’s adaptive response to stimuli, emotions have been shown to influence individual decision-making, but the mechanism of how emotions influence the process of consumer information sharing is still a brand-new topic that urgently needs attention and discussion.　　Based on the study of existing domestic and foreign literature, this paper mainly draws the following conclusions. First, the relationship between emotions, information, and sharing behaviors is mainly achieved through direct and intermediary paths. In the direct path, emotions are apparent in the information. Consumers can intuitively obtain emotional feelings through marketing information, and make quick judgments and decisions based on explicit emotions in the information. There is no need to integrate external marketing information and consumers’ internal memory and association. In the intermediary path, emotions result from the stimuli of marketing information. Besides the marketing information itself, the presentation form and the presentation environment of marketing information can be used as stimuli to influence consumers’ emotions, and then affect their sharing behaviors. Existing research focuses more on the intermediary path of emotions and ignores the direct path of emotions. Second, when discussing the differences in the effects of different emotions on information sharing behaviors, based on the emotion classification theory, scholars mainly discuss three aspects which respectively are emotion types, valence and arousal. It is found that information containing emotions are more communicative than those with no emotion. However, the current studies have not reached a consistent conclusion about whether positive or negative emotions are more likely to lead to consumers’ sharing behaviors. Third, based on the logic of " stimulus induce emotions and emotions induce behaviors”, the functional process of information, emotions and sharing behaviors can be separated into three phases that each phase has a different theoretical basis. The emotional contagion theory and the emotion priming theory are mainly used to explain why external information stimuli can lead to different emotional changes. The emotion regulation theory is mainly used to explain why consumers will share information after experiencing emotional changes. The selective awareness theory and the negative bias theory is mainly used to explain why different emotions lead to different sharing behaviors.　　Future research can deeply explore the mechanism of emotions in the process of marketing information sharing, and the individual’s choice and processing mechanism for marketing information. In order to better explain the issue of " what information consumers are more willing to share”, it can be discussed specifically in the following three aspects: the emotions’ influence on re-dissemination of marketing information, the " emotional preference” effect of information media, and the mechanism of mixed emotions.