The Effect Of Product Value On Social Media Advertisement Forwarding Decision

With the development of Internet infrastructures and the popularity of online social media applications,more and more users are connected with social media.It creates new opportunities for the diffusion of online commercial advertisements.Compared to the traditional mode of advertisement exposure which only allows the advertisement to be presented on the paid webpage,commercials now are able to set up official accounts on social media platforms and publish their advertisements for users' transmission.This new mode has its merits as a result of the endorsement of the transmitters.Therefore,this mode is widely adopted by global commercials.There is a stream of literature discussing how advertisement transmission can be facilitated,but little attention has been paid to advertisement's negative side and the strategies to solve it.Advertisement is a special kind of information:it has both the positive side like its usefulness and negative side like its manipulation and deception.To fully understand advertisement transmission on social media,it is necessary to take both positive and negative sides of the advertisement into consideration in research.This research relies on "stimuli-organism-response" model and rational choice theory as the overarching framework to study the reposting decision process and behavior.Firstly,according to the different targets of product value,this research discusses the benefit-cost calculus mechanism of the expected outcomes in self-based and other-based reposting scenarios.To be specific,in the self-based scenario,self-image congruence is the positive expected outcome while self-image concern is the negative expected outcome;in the other-based scenario,relationship maintenance is the positive expected outcome while perceived norm violation is the negative expected outcome.Secondly,this research discusses the mechanism how perceived product value influences reposting decision.Last but not least,different types of reposting customization to explore the effects design features have in facilitating reposting.The current research examines the hypotheses developed in self-based and other-based reposting scenarios by two 2x2x2 experiments.The results suggest that perceived product value will influence the reposting decision,and the effect will be strengthened by reposting customization:in the self-based scenario,perceived product value will positively affect self-image congruence while negatively affect self-image concern,customization of justification will amplify these two effects,and finally influence reposting behavior;in the other-based scenario,perceived product value will positively affect relationship maintenance while negatively affect perceived norm violation,customization of directed dialog accessibility will amplify these two effects,and finally influence reposting behavior.This research contributes to the literature on social media advertisement transmission in three aspects.Firstly,this research proposes an analytic framework including both benefit and cost in advertisement reposting.According to the salient negative side of advertisement,this is the more rational way to study.Secondly,this research sheds light on the mechanism through which perceived product value influences advertisement reposting.Existing literature has a missing link here.The current research opens the black box here to show how perceived product value influences advertisement reposting in a social media setting.Thirdly,this research also finds the effect of customization on reposting.Prior researches on advertisement focus on the characteristics of advertisement or the audience.This research enriches the existing body of literature in the perspective of feature design.Meanwhile,for the researches on system customization,this research provides the exploration in an opposite direction.Rather than the customized receiving,this research helps to understand system customization from customized sending.