The Research On Consumer Self-construction In Contextual Marketing Communication From The Perspective Of Symbolic Interaction

Digital marketing communication has undergone earth-shaking changes driven by technological changes.In particular,the mobile Internet technology has changed the contextual form a lot,such as the real contextual form,the virtual contextual from,the fixed contextual form,the mobile contextual form,the offline contextual form and the online contextual form.This paper takes contextual marketing communication as the research object and chooses the symbolic interaction theory as the research perspective,focusing on consumers' self-construction in the contextual marketing communication process.The core elements of contextual marketing communication are time,space and consumers.The consumption scene,leisure scene and life scene are respectively in the core layer,middle layer and peripheral layer of contextual marketing communication.In the mobile internet era,mobile terminals,social media,big data,positioning systems and sensors are the five technical forces of contextual marketing communication,which change the lifestyle and consumption habits of consumers.Under the influence of technical forces,context applications are represented by context recognition,context matching and context triggering.In this research,following the development of media technology,we will sort out the evolution of contextual marketing communication,from face-to-face real contexts to digital virtual contexts,and finally changing into virtual and symbiotic fusion contexts.This study regards contextual marketing communication as a special information symbol system.The contextual symbol system,which exists in the form of context flow,is represented by information flow,relationship flow and service flow.The construction of the contextual symbol system mainly creates the context atmosphere and renders the context mood through environmental factors,technical factors and artistic factors.It uses the performance and suspense story plots to attract consumers' attentions.In this way,consumers can feel the triple states of contextual marketing communication as context presentation?reproduction and coexistence.This study considers that consumers are the core element of the contextual symbol system.It is a performance of "self" in a specific context.To be further,in this research,the self-construction in contextual marketing communication is disassembled into three aspects: Identity,Role and Relationship.The main content of this research is constructed from the representation of consumers in the contextual marketing communication,and it explores the self-construction of consumers from three dimensions as identity,role and relationship.The first part is about the consumer's self-construction of identity symbols in contextual marketing communication.The study decomposes the consumer's identity symbols into identity definition,identity recognition and identity acknowledgement.Firstly,when a consumer enters a context,he/she first faces the definition of his/her identity.The context defines the identity of the consumer.Conversely,the real identity of the consumer in daily life also determines their virtual choices.Secondly,from the perspective of technology development,context recognition technology develops from face recognition,speech recognition,behavior recognition to identity recognition.The improvement of data granularity technology helps to label consumers' identities.As a result,marketers can accurately get consumers' personal information and it is more and more obvious that consumer's identity symbols are getting anthropomorphized.Thirdly,the contexts provide consumers with both real and virtual identities.As consumers sustain to construct their own identity in the work,life and entertainment contexts,the combination of real and virtual contexts realizes consumers' identity acknowledgement and finally completes the complex self-construction process.The second part is about consumers' self-construction of role symbols in contextual marketing communication,which can be decomposed into three parts as role setting,role playing and role integration.Firstly,marketers set roles for consumers before they enter a context.Secondly,when a consumer enters it,the role-playing and game interaction will help them fully experience and feel the fun and charm of the contextual marketing communication.Thirdly,the contextual marketing communication enhances the consumer's perception and experience of the product brand,so that consumers can deeply integrate into the context role,realize role identification and finally complete self-construction process.The last part is about the consumer's self-construction of relationship symbols in contextual marketing communication.And it is divided into relationship activation,relationship connection and relationship maintenance.Firstly,the relationship between the consumers and contexts have expanded from social area to consumer area as the Wechat focuses on acquaintance relationship,the Weibo powered by interest aggregation and the live broadcast,short video contexts become popular as a selling point of entertainment and funny.All of these apps fully activate the relationship between the consumers and the contexts.Secondly,this study analyzes the relationship between consumers and contexts from online and offline channels.The offline context focuses on new retail contexts,which aims to break through the shopping experience of consumers and form a “people-goods-context” marketing communication model.While the online context application is based on one-stop context recommendation that centers on consumer's life needs and satisfies consumers' various desires for purchase.Thirdly,a variety of contextual marketing communication strategies enable consumers to form a community-based virtual community.Being influenced and constrained by the power of the scene,the emotional connection between consumers helps consumers to have a sense of belonging to the various contexts.Furthermore,it can also enhance their trust in products and increase consumers' loyalty to the brand.As a result,the constructed relationship will stimulate consumers' purchase intentions and finally promote purchase behaviors.The conclusion part of the thesis reviews and summarizes the research.It reflects on the limitations of the research and forecasts the future development of the contextual marketing communication.