The Effect Of Consumer’s Lonliness On Impulse Buying

Loneliness(relationship deficits)is becoming more pervasive as social networks become more developed.Although these relationship deficits have become the mainstream,scholars have paid little attention to how these relationship deficits affect consumers.The purpose of this article is to explore how loneliness can influence consumer’s impulsive behavior under social media context.What role does parasocial interaction plays therein? And the moderating effect of the importance of relationships.This article is based on the research on the relationship between loneliness and impulsive consumption,introducing a general concept of communication—— parasocial interaction.People with high loneliness tend to spend more time on the mass media to improve their negative emotions.Thus they are more likely to be involved in the situation of parasocial interaction.Specific situation may give consumers specific marketing incentives,which will encourage consumers to do more impulsive consumption.Impulsive consumption is a recognized phenomenon.With the rich diversity of social media,people have more diversified channels for impulsive consumption,such as "rampant gifting" in webcast.Through literature review,hypothesis proposing,experiment design and data analysis,this paper assumes and verifies the moderating effect of the importance of relationships and the mediating effect of PSI.The results show that people with high longliness are more likely to consume impulsively,and they are easy to have parasocial interaction with media characters,which enhances impulsive consumption tendency.While the relationship of which people lack(social relationship vs emotional relationship)are more important than the other,the corresponding loneliness category(social loneliness vs emotional loneliness)will give greater impact on impulsive consumtion,and vice versa.This study enriches the literature of loneliness and impulsive consumption.It provides theoretical reference for relevant marketing research to some degree,which has certain theoretical significance and practical significance.