• Socialnomics: The Relationships between Mobile Social Advertising, Word-of-Mouth (WOM) Order, and Emotion

Abstract

Mobile social media has become an indispensable tool for Internet+ businesses. However, consumers are often exposed to the environment of mobile social media through advertisements that are full of positive and negative word-of-mouth (WOM) content. The influence of advertising combined with a positive–negative WOM order (or vice versa) on consumer emotions is poorly explained by the current “impact of a single message” argument through the hierarchy-of-effects model. Therefore, this study utilized the primacy–recency effect theory to examine the interactive effects of social advertising and different WOM orders on consumer emotions in mobile social media. Our main findings revealed that consumers who view empathetic content social advertising are mainly affected by the primacy effect, indicating that early positive or negative WOM content has a higher effect on consumer emotions. This effect also allows for a positive–negative WOM order to have a larger impact on the positive emotions of consumers. By contrast, consumers who view stimulating content social advertising are mainly affected by the recency effect, indicating that the later positive or negative WOM content has a larger impact on consumer emotions; this effect also allows for a positive–negative WOM order to have a larger impact on the negative emotions of consumers. Further examination revealed that consumers’ positive emotions have an inverted-U effect on purchasing intention.

Keywords: Internet+, socialnomics, Mobile Social Advertising, Word-of-Mouth Order, Emotion