New product launching: The effect of firm-generated content on purchase intention

ZHANG Kedan, FANG Wenpei*, LUO Biao, WAN Liang

1.School of Management, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China;2.School of Management, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei 230009, China

Abstract: The launching of new products is important for the success of a firm. Nowadays, official brand pages have become one of the main channels to launch new products because of the low cost and high controllability. Firm-generated content (FGC) is a potential signal of product quality and product brand, which gradually turns into the key information for companies to launch new products. In case of the market launch of new products, this study investigates the effect of FGC effectiveness on purchase intention. The online experiment was conducted and data were collected from 423 brand followers on Sina Weibo. The structural equation modeling was used to empirically test the proposed conceptual framework. Findings of the direct effects of the research show that emotional appeal positively affects purchase intention. Informativeness and emotional appeal are the important predictors of the perceived quality and brand attitude, and further influence purchase intention. This study also demonstrates that the perceived quality has a positive impact on the brand attitude, showing that the perceived quality and brand attitude sequentially mediate the effects of FGC effectiveness on purchase intention. The results implicate that a firm should not only serve as an information provider but also serve more as an emotional provider.

Keywords: new product launching;firm-generated content;perceived quality;brand attitude;purchase intention

1 Introduction

The advances in technology are making a massive impact on how firms market to people. Sina Weibo (similar to Twitter) is one of the most popular social media platforms in China with nearly 500 million monthly users. Since Sina launched Sina Weibo in August 2009, companies are gradually building marketing connections with customers in the way of non-traditional channels[1], for instance, directly share product-related information, conversation topics and storytelling[2,3]. They operate the official brand pages on Sina Weibo,including posting microblogs to hook users. These firm-initiated marketing communications in its official social media pages[4,5]are named the firm-generated content (FGC). Firms can connect with customers through the use of FGC, and they regard FGC as an important channel for external promotion. When a new product appears on the market for the first time, consumers usually have low awareness of them because of the insufficient efforts made by the marketers. Therefore,FGC is a beneficial way for companies to strengthen publicity in case of the market launch of new products. Firms often disseminate information related to new products launch through videos, images, and positive stories about their brands on social media[6], attracting consumers to learn about and purchase new products. New product preannouncement, new product introduction and relevant marketing tweets are common means of new product publicity. To promote product sales, firms provide product purchase links for more convenience to consumer purchase. For one thing, more people could be accessible in a short space of time[7]. For another, FGC costs less than online advertisement and is more controllable than eWOM (electronic word-of-mouth) or UGC (user-generated content)[4]. Therefore, it’s essential to fully understand the influence path between FGC and purchase behavior[8]. Park et al. focused on online new music research situation, and found the dynamic effects of FGC and UGC in different periods after a song is released[9]. In the middle and final periods, FGC is as vital as UGC. In addition to their constructive research on music release, we find that few studies have focused on the market launch of new products. The launching of a successful new product is related to consumers’ attitude toward the new product, their intention to recommend and purchase[10]. So it becomes imperative to explore the impact of FGC on the new product purchase intention.

The FGC plays a significant role in improving consumers’ attitude and influencing purchasing behavior. Schivinski and Dabrowski pointed out that firms use FGC to engage with loyal consumers, positively influencing consumer perceptions of products and brands[11]. Müller and Christandl also found that FGC leads to a level of persuasion knowledge, and in turn, establish and change users’ brand attitude as a reaction to the persuasion attempt[12]. Moreover, as a purchase motivation, FGC is proved to increase customer purchase intention[4,8], thus eliciting sales of products[13]. In the context of new product launches, FGC also has an important effect on influencing consumer perception and behavior. Therefore, the impact of FGC has been a concerning problem for many companies. However, many studies focused on the types of FGC from the marketing and messages perspective[13-16], but few concentrated on FGC effectiveness. Therefore, we focus on two essential effects (informative effect and persuasive effect), and conceptualize FGC effectiveness as two dimensions of informativeness and emotional appeal.Moreover, the great majority of marketers measure the influence result of FGC effectiveness on consumer behavior by the sales volume of new products or the number of tweets, forwarding and comments, and other objective data. However, some potential but important consumer cognition and emotion are ignored in this process. It is necessary to understand individual customer drivers[17]and pay attention to the perceived quality of new products and brand attitude.

Consequently, our study explores the direct effect of FGC effectiveness on consumers’ purchase intention at first, and the research conclusion emphasizes the direct effect of emotional appeal on purchase intention. Secondly, the research looks into the influence of FGC effectiveness on perceived quality and brand attitude, which are two crucial determinants of purchase intention. Finally, we in-depth study the impact of the perceived quality on the brand attitude, and further explore the effect of FGC effectiveness on purchase intention through the sequential intervening factors (perceived quality and brand attitude).

In this study,the empirical analysis on investigation data of 423 brand followers based on the experimental design is conducted to test the hypothesis. With further analysis, our study offers three contributions. First, we established the causal effect of FGC effectiveness on purchase intention in the case of new product launches, which enriched the research situation of FGC. Second, we focus on the informativeness and emotional appeal, test the influence of FGC effectiveness on the perceived quality, purchase intention, brand attitude, and provide a deep explanation of the theoretical mechanism of FGC effectiveness. Third, we investigate the mediating role of the brand attitude and perceived quality, and find that they play an essential mediating role in the influence of FGC effectiveness on purchase intention, which provides new insights for the research on the brand attitude and perceived quality.

1 Literature review, research framework,and hypothesis

1.1 Firm-generated content and its effectiveness

Social media platforms have offered companies special services for social media marketing, allowing them to attract business fans and implement social media marketing campaigns. Firms often communicate with followers by creating content with different themes, such as rewards, products, work, achievements, emotions, earnings[1]. These firm-initiated marketing communications in the brand pages are firm-generated content (FGC)[4]. FGC is disseminated through different platforms with different forms, such as texts, pictures, and videos[8]. The typical examples of FGC include textual brand posts promoting the latest deals, sales promotion posts, brand-created videos about new product launches[18]. These firm-created tweets play a considerable role in the enterprise marketing. They are becoming an important channel for firms to participate in commercial social media. For example, companies always take advantage of available social networking site (e.g., Sina Weibo) to disseminate new product information[10]. Meanwhile, by improving users’ interest and increasing their participation (e.g., forwards, comments and likes)[19], enterprises promote new products to target markets with lower costs and then gain benefits from a large number of followers or potential customers.

Potential consumers could be raised by creating and publishing attractive content[20]. Therefore, it is a problem for firms about how to detect the category of content that has the most responsive and which category is more effective that could close contact with followers. Previous studies focus on the FGC from different perspectives, such as marketing perspective[13]and messages perspective[14-16]. For instance, Raji et al. operationalized FGC as social media advertising, social media promotion, and social media interactive marketing in the context of marketing communications[13]. Yang et al. classified FGC as informative (shifting beliefs about products or prices) and persuasive (shifting preferences directly) to conduct a detailed message-level analysis[14]. However, only a few researches have considered FGC effectiveness, which is the important factor influencing consumers’ attitude towards products or brands. FGC must be effective enough to stimulate followers’ responses (e.g., express their attitudes and preferences publicly) and guide them to participate in the interaction. After attracting the long-term interest of consumers, they are convinced to make purchase decisions[21]. In recent research, Colicev et al. paid attention to the effect of FGC.They compared the informative and persuasive effect of FGC with UGC by text analysis, in which FGC was measured from three dimensions of neutral valence, positive valence, and vividness[18].In a similar study of advertising effectiveness, Lee and Hong proposed emotional appeal and informativeness as two dimensions of social media advertising effectiveness[22]. We draw on their research and consider the informative and persuasive effect of FGC. Emotional appeal and informativeness are adopted to describe the FGC effectiveness. Informativeness refers to the ability of advertising to inform consumers of alternative product information[23], which can match consumers’ demands to firms’ products, so as to make the market more efficient[24]. The perceived informative contents not only provide compelling facts (e.g., price, brand, and deal)[25], but also work on describing new benefits associated with the new product (e.g., improved function and price comparison). It highlights the brand’s existence and its product characteristics. Emotional appeal is defined as the ability to persuade consumers to change their preferences using emotional content. It’s a persuasive stimulus, which contaminates the followers’ information processing, and in turn, affects their emotional responses[26]. Such different emotional responses may be various since consumers’ abilities to connect with particular events, persons, or situations are different[27]. The common emotional appeals include humor, passion, nostalgia, and warmth. It is related to product information and brand personality, such as introducing new products in the form of humorous stories.

1.1.1 Informativeness effects new product purchase intention

Informativeness plays a vital role in consumer purchase decisions. Consumers achieve purchasing goals and fulfill their purchasing tasks depending on rich, accurate, and helpful information[28]. Consumers often feel diffident when they make a new product purchase decision because of the information asymmetry[29,30], especially when the new product is just launched, and there is little product information in the market. Informativeness provides new product information, such as product description or product update upgrade. The perceived information direct consumers to producers and specific products and attracts users’ attention[24], thus improving consumption motivation[31]. Consumers then could make a further intelligent buying decision[19,32]. Yang et al. found that publishing more information could significantly increase consumer spending and reduce consumer price sensitivity[14]. Hence, we posit:

H1: Informativeness has a direct, positive influence on new product purchase intention.

1.1.2 Emotional appeal effects new product purchase intention

Emotional appeal establishes the emotional connection between the consumer and brand pages. Osei-Frimpong and Mclean suggested that emotional appeal can attract consumers, excite and arouse their interest in brand engagement[33]. Meanwhile, the contents triggering emotion tend to be passed along the most by consumers[34,35]. When a consumer produces a significant emotional response, it leads to future purchase intention[36]. Therefore, marketers and retailers tended to use emotions as guides to make judgment, since it’s an important predictor of consumer behaviors[28,37]. While browsing FGC related to new products and thus evaluating certain products, consumers largely seek emotional gratification[38]. When the perceived emotion appeal meets consumers’ emotional demands, it promotes the emotional response of consumers, which helps to attract their attention to FGC, and then consumers would make a good impression on the benefits of new products. Besides, emotional appeals could prevail on followers to change their purchasing preference, generate a sense of identity for new products, and make the consumer tend to buy the mentioned products. Therefore, we predict:

H2: Emotional appeal has a direct, positive influence on new product purchase intention.

1.2 The mediation effect of perceived quality

The perceived quality is consumer judgment regarding the overall excellence or superiority of a product[39]. Product quality evaluations are predominantly based on a cognitive processing mechanism[40].These cognitive evaluations are always deemed a multi-dimensional measure, consisting of workmanship, appearance, design, durability, functionality, prestige, and value for money[41,42]. Perceived quality plays a vital role in reducing perceived risk[43]. Users always face higher risks when buying new products, since the consequences of product usage are unknown[25]. Consumers compare multiple products attributes against other products[44]and predict the use results of products in the cognitive process. The results of product usage could be predictable and imaginable when consumers have a higher new product quality perception. On the contrary, followers will actively search for information if they can’t observe the product quality[45]. Hence, the higher the perceived quality of new products, the purchase intention is stronger[40,46,47]. Thus, we posit:

H3:The perceived quality has a direct, positive influence on new product purchase intention.

Previous study has shown that FGC is a signal which transmits inherent product quality information from reviewers to potential consumers[48]. FGC conveys information and emotion content credibly to customers, and signal product quality to consumers.

Information asymmetry may exist between transacting parties since sellers have more product information; hence the purchasers need to infer product quality from predictable information[45]. FGC on social media introduces the products’ attributes, functions as well as application scenarios. Some special features are highlighted as new product’s selling points[48]. The advantages of new products are magnified due to the marketing purpose. Therefore, it’s easy for consumers to infer the quality of products after obtaining rich and useful product characteristics information; if consumers obtain little or useless information from FGC, they can’t infer product quality. So we propose:

H4: Informativeness has a direct, positive influence on the perceived quality.

Emotional appeal is depicted by creating affective or subjective impressions of the intangible aspects of a product[49]. It combines emotional content with the product, and makes it easier for consumers to have similar emotions to the product. The affect transfer models of persuasion showed that emotion-eliciting stimuli could be associated with the related product or brand, and try transferring the identical emotion from individual to the target object[50]. In the process, the original evaluations of the product or brand in the past have changed, and finally realize the aim of persuading[51]. In a word, consumers transfer the same emotion on the product attributes, and make simple reasoning decisions to form the quality evaluation of new products. Accordingly, we hypothesize:

H5: Emotional appeal has a direct, positive influence on perceived quality.

Perceived quality has a mediating effect between FGC effectiveness (informativeness, emotional appeal) and purchase intention. On the one hand, in the context of new product launches on social media, product information influences the perception of quality and preference[52]. Informativeness pushes consumers to make a higher evaluation of product quality, and then increase the attraction of products. On the other hand, consumers who are influenced by the emotional appeal transfer their emotions associated with new products. They make heuristic inferences, such as “this new product is good”, which helps improve their purchase intention. In line with these findings, we propose:

H6:The perceived quality mediates the effect of informativeness on new product purchase intention.

H7:The perceived quality mediates the effect of emotional appeal on new product purchase intention.

1.3 The mediation effect of brand attitude

Enhancing consumers’ brand awareness is considered one of a firm generated contents motivator. The created attractive content can positively affect the brand attitude of consumers[12]. Mitchell and Olson defined the brand attitude as a consumer’s overall evaluation of a brand[54]. It is an assessment around favorable or unfavorable reactions to brand-related stimuli or conviction[53]. They note that the brand attitude was the most crucial predictor of consumer behavior towards a product or service[54]. According to Jung and Seock[55], brand attitude represented an affective dimension, which could influence consumers’ personal behavioral tendency in terms of purchasing products. The positive brand attitude leads consumers to buy products of the company instead of choosing a competitor’s similar products[56].

H8: Brand attitude has a direct, positive influence on new product purchase intention.

Firms try to provide more information and emotional content, which become a signal to reflect the brand quality and image. The rich and useful cues of new products provided by firms are regarded as high-quality information, which would improve their brand attitudes[11].

Informativeness is mainly concerned with the needed information or essential facts provided by firms. It helps consumers to be aware of the brand and product existence, and then change their perception of the brand[57]. Informative contents draw followers’ attention and actuate them to link information with a positive image[22], thus leading to positive attitudes toward the brand. Besides, since the brand pages on the social media platform provides duly updated information, consumers love to obtain information (e.g., new product information) over these brand pages[58]. Thus, it is posited that:

H9: Informativeness has a direct, positive influence on the brand attitude.

Emotional appeal would be very effective to brand attitude in certain products, categories, and cultures, such as high technology products, socially sensitive products, and utilitarian products[59]. Yoo and MacInnis found that positive feelings and some negative feelings which relevant to the communication enhance evaluations of the ad’s credibility, and positively influence ad attitudes[60]. Similarly, emotional appeal stimulates the emotional response of consumers, which helps to improve the credibility of FGC, and then persuades consumers to enhance the brand attitude. Besides, the evoked emotions related to emotional appeal encourage followers to transfer similar emotional responses to the relevant brand[91]. Hence we hypothesize:

H10: Emotional appeal has a direct, positive influence on the brand attitude.

FGC maintains the relationship between users and brands on social media platforms[8], and influences consumers’ attitude and behavior towards the brand that produces the content. The informative contents change users’ perceptions of the brand, improve their attitude towards the brand, and then affect their purchase intention. Emotional appeal stimulates their emotional response to the brand and improves their attitude towards brands, which leads to purchase motivation[61]. In line with these findings, we propose:

H11:The brand attitude mediates the effect of informativeness on new product purchase intention.

H12:The brand attitude mediates the effect of emotional appeal on new product purchase intention.

1.4 Sequential mediating roles of perceived quality and brand attitude

As previously mentioned, perceived quality is a consumers’ appraisal of a product’s overall excellence or superiority[39]. These cognitive procedures of considering product benefits evoke a positive brand attitude[62,63]. Previous researches have suggested that brand attitude increases as the perceived quality increases[64,65]. Therefore, product quality is potentially an important factor that influences consumers’ attitudes towards the brand. Customers evaluate a product with a multi-dimensional measure and develop attitudes toward brand afterwards. On these grounds, we proposed:

H13: Perceived quality has a direct, positive influence on brand attitude.

This research stresses that the two dimensions of FGC effectiveness of informativeness and emotional appeal have a significantly positive effect on perceived quality. Perceived quality is claimed to further exert influence on brand attitude, which in turn leads to the new product purchase intention. These hypotheses together reveal that perceived quality and brand attitude serve as a sequential mediating mechanism through which relational communications affect the purchase intention. In summary, in the context of new product launches, whether informativeness or emotional appeal, could promote consumers to actively evaluate the quality of new products, thus improving their attitude towards the brand, and forming purchase motivation. Therefore, we propose:

H14:The perceived quality and brand attitude sequentially mediate the effects of informativeness on new product purchase intention.

H15:The perceived quality and brand attitude sequentially mediate the effects of emotional appeal on new product purchase intention.

2 Research methodology

2.1 Experimental design

To test the proposed model, our study adopts a measurement of self-reported online questionnaire based on experimental design. In the context of new product launches, we desire to collect data about customers’ perceived quality,brand attitude, and purchase intention after they browse the FGC. We chose a kind of product as the targeted new product, i.e., backpack. There are three reasons for the selection. First, brands of backpacks often launch new products on social media, attracting consumers to take purchase intention. Second, the backpack is a necessity for most young consumers, regardless of gender. Third, the backpack is a common product for which consumers could imagine consumption without difficulty. Therefore, we select the new backpacks tweets that were posted by twenty enterprises, which were showed in Figure 1. These brand pages, taken from Sina Weibo, consist of pictures and words. The firms are introducing their latest backpacks to users and guiding them to purchase. We study a selection of 20 FGC that showed different styles and material quality of the backpack, which could minimize the possible product bias[66,67].

Figure 1. FGC stimulus (a portion).

All construct items were measured using seven-point Likert scales (1=strongly disagree; 7=strongly agree). Informativeness was measured using a three-item scale adopted from Davis[68], Escalas and Stern[69], Lee and Hong[22]. Emotional appeal was measured on a three-item from Logan et al.[70]and Pavlou et al.[71]. Perceived quality was measured with five items used by Dodds et al.[72], and brand attitude was measured using a four-item adaptation of Yoo and MacInnis[60]scale. The purchase intentions measure (three items) was taken from Grewal et al.[73]. Self-congruity measures were taken from Sirgy et al.[74].Furthermore, we selected some sociodemographics (i.e., age, gender, educational level, monthly income, occupation), expected price, and self-congruity as control variables. First, these demographic variables above are the most common control variables. For instance, resultant attitudes and behaviors are different for males and females (e.g., Taylor[75]). Second,the product price is directly related to consumers’ purchase intention, and also affects people’s judgment of the product quality[76]. Third, self-congruity refers the match between one’s self-image and the image of a product, brand, or product users[77]. Researchers have discovered the direct linkage between attitudes, loyalty, behavioral intentions and self-congruity[78,79]. Most consumers tend to buy the products matching consumers’ personalities or identities[80]. Thus, we controlled for self-congruity.

2.2 Data collection

We randomly recruited 423 volunteers who had experience following and engaging with brands on Sina Weibo.Our experiment has 20 groups. There were 21 people in the first 17 groups and 22 people in the last three groups.Participants were instructed to imagine they had a backpack purchase plan recently. Then, they reviewed one of 20 randomly assigned brand pages since randomization is the only method of controlling all possible extraneous variables[81]. Volunteers were asked to answer a set of questions regarding their respective backpacks to capture the perceptions of them.

Table 1 summarizes the sample’s demographic characteristics. The sample consists of 176 males (41.6%) and 247 females (58.4%), which is in line with the core user report published by Sina Weibo (60% of females). The most common age category was below 30 years (96.30%), and the majority of respondents reported that they have (or were currently receiving) a college education (97.5%). Therefore, these samples were considered suitable for the study, since most participants have enough ability and wisdom to understand and complete the experiment.

Table 1. Sample characteristics.

2.3 Reliability and validity analysis

We check the variance inflation factor (VIF) to confirm the multicollinearity in our research. The VIF values range from 1.294 to 1.608 which are considerably lower than 10 suggested by Hair et al.[81].

Before testing the research model and research hypotheses, we conduct the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to assure the reliability and validity (shown in Table 2). The outcomes of the CFA test indicate a good fit (χ2= 288.410,df=194,χ2/df=1.487, CFI=0.986, NFI=0.958, RMSEA=0.034). According to Table 2, the values of Cronbach’sαfor informativeness (INF), emotional appeal (EMO), perceived quality (PQ), brand attitude (BA), new product purchase intention (NPQ), Self-congruity (SC) are 0.834, 0.832, 0.925, 0.908, 0.943, 0.916, respectively. All the values exceed the acceptable value of 0.70[82]. The lowest standardized factor loading (0.714) are greater than level of 0.7 as suggested by Hair et al.[83]. Composite reliability (CR) of all the measurement items are greater than level of 0.7 as suggested by Garver and Mentzer[84]. Minimum AVE value (0.630) exceeds acceptable value of 0.5[85]. As shown in Table 3, the square root of AVE of a latent construct is greater than the intercorrelations between constructs, ensuring the six dimensions achieved discriminant validity[85].

Table 2. Measurement model results.

(To be continued on the next page)

Table 3. Descriptive statistics and intercorrelations for the study construct.

2.4 Common method variance

Because the cross-sectional study collect data from one source, we use Harman’s one-factor test to check the common method variance (CMV) estimations[86]. In the exploratory factor analysis, the results revealed that the largest variance explained by the first factor was 38.337% of the total variance (did not occupy the majority of the variance). All the extracted factors explained 79.462% of the total variance. Therefore, there is no common method bias in the study.

3 Results

In order to analyze the relationship in the research framework, we use the structural equation modeling (SEM)[87]to test the multiple influences between the variables. Self-congruity, expected price, and demographic variables are included in our proposed model as control variables. Before the path analysis, we check the goodness-of-fit of our model. All goodness of fit measures indicates that the proposed model adequately represents the hypothesized constructs:χ2= 528.838,df=308,χ2/df=1.717, CFI=0.968, NFI=0.927, GFI=0.915, RMSEA=0.041. Figure 2 provides the complete structural model, including the standardized loads and path significance values for the significant relationships. Also, it explains variance (R2) for each path.

Controls: Age (t=1.256, p>0.05); Gender (t=-1.015, p>0.05); Education (t=-0.758, p>0.05); Expected price (t=2.197, p<0.05); Monthly disposable income (t=-2.154, p<0.05); Self-congruity (t=4.621, p<0.001). *p<0.05; **p<0.01; ***p<0.001.Figure 2. Structural model result.

HypothesisPath coefficientt-valueResultsH1 Informativeness → New product purchase intention-0.001-0.025rejectedH2 Emotional appeal → New product purchase intention0.1472.516?supportedH3 Perceived quality → New product purchase intention0.1953.493???supportedH4 Informativeness → Perceived quality0.3596.116???supportedH5 Emotional appeal → Perceived quality0.2774.925???supportedH8 Brand attitude → New product purchase intention0.3195.455???supportedH9 Informativeness → Brand attitude0.1462.473?supportedH10 Emotional appeal → Brand attitude0.3606.065???supportedH13 Perceived quality → Brand attitude0.1893.290??supported

The results of SEM are summarized in Table 4. As depicted by the table, the first hypothesis (H1) states that informativeness positively influences on new product purchase intention is rejected (-0.001,p>0.05). The path coefficients of hypothesis 2 (H2) suggests that there is a positive relationship between emotional appeal and new product purchase intention is supported (0.147,p<0.05). The third hypothesis (H3) states that perceived quality has a positive influence on new product purchase intention (0.195,p<0.001). Similarly, hypothesis 4 (H4) suggests that informativeness significantly influences the perceived quality (0.359,p<0.001). Hypothesis 5 (H5) suggests that emotional appeal has a positive impact on the perceived quality (0.277,p<0.001). Hypothesis 8 (H8) which advances a positive relationship between the brand attitude toward new product purchase intention is also significant (0.319,p<0.001). Hypothesis 9 (H9) states that informativeness has a positive influence on the brand attitude (0.146,p<0.05). Hypothesis 10 (H10) refers to the direct and positive influence of the emotional appeal on the brand attitude (0.360,p<0.001). As suggested by H10, the results show that the perceived quality has a positive influence on the brand attitude (0.189,p<0.01). Informativeness and emotional appeal are found to explain 28% of the variance in perceived quality, and explain 31% of the variance in the brand attitude.

To verify the proposed mediation hypothesis, we conduct the method of bias-corrected and percentile bootstrap CIs in AMOS. The results are showed in Table 5: (1) point estimate=0.084 (Z=2.710,Z>2.58, INF→PQ→NPI); (2) point estimate=0.051 (Z=1.962,Z>1.96, INF→BA→NPI); (3) point estimate=0.022 (Z=2.000,Z>1.96, INF→PQ→BA→NP); (4) point estimate=0.061 (Z=2.542,Z>1.96, EMO→PQ→NPI); (5) point estimate=0.136 (Z=4,Z>3.29, EMO→BA→NPI); (6) point estimate=0.015 (Z=2.143,Z>1.96, EMO→PQ→BA→NPI), where, within a 95% confidence interval, each is indirect. Thus, we draw the conclusion that six intermediary relationship models have gotten remarkable results (H6, H7, H11, H12, H14, and H15 are supported), since there was no zero between the effect’s lower and upper limits[88]. It has been identified that the direct effect of informativeness on purchase intention is not significant, while the emotional appeal have a notable relationship with the purchase intention. Therefore, the three intermediary relationships (1, 2, 3) belong to the full intermediary model, and the rest three intermediary relationships (4, 5, 6) belong to the partial intermediary model.

Table 5. The mediation results of this study.

4 Conclusions

This study builds a conceptual framework in the context of new product launches to explain how FGC effectiveness (informativeness and emotional appeal) affected consumers’ perceptions of product quality and attitude towards brands and consequently, influences new product purchase intention. We test the proposed framework using SEM, and the findings empirically support the model. The results show that the consumer’s perception of FGC has an important impact on new product purchase intention, which adds value to the existing research, especially in the context of social media marketing.

First,emotional appeal directly influences purchase intention by meeting consumers’ emotional demands, while informativeness only indirectly influences purchase intention. This is probably because of the single available information access for subjects (only from brand pages in our experiment), which may significantly reduce source credibility, and typically lessen the persuasive impact of the message[89]. Furthermore, consumers are encouraged to search for more information to reduce usage uncertainties because of the risk of new products[90]. Therefore, just relying on the information provided by firms, it is hard for consumers to directly make purchase decisions. Our results show that informativeness always affects the new product purchase intention through cognitive and affective factors.

Second, this study has found the FGC effectiveness helps to improve the perceived quality and brand attitude. On the one hand, informativeness is shown to be one of the significant predictors of the perceived quality and brand attitude. Consumers could assess the quality of the new product when aware of brand existence and product characteristics. They associate high-quality information with a positive image, thus leading to a more positive brand attitude. On the other hand, the emotional appeal is also one of the important predictors of the perceived quality and brand attitude. It stimulates consumers’ emotions and convinces them to transfer similar emotional responses to the evaluation of the product quality and corresponding brand.

Third, our research results support the evidence for the influence of the perceived quality and brand attitude positively to purchase intention. Consumers tend to prefer new products with high perceived quality. They evaluate the quality of new products based on a cognitive processing mechanism, and then make purchase decisions. The positive attitude towards the brand helps users distinguish brand products from other competitive products and between them, they much prefer the former.

Finally, our mediation results show the influence of informativeness on new product purchase intention, with fully mediating roles played by the perceived quality and brand attitude. Users appraise the quality advantages of products based on informative content and raise their willingness to purchase. Moreover, the provided information of products as an external stimulus has a significant impact on consumers’ psychological perception of the brand, encouraging them to combine the informative content with the positive image of the brand to form a brand attitude, and then influence personal purchasing behavioral tendency. In the relationship between emotional appeal and purchase intention, the perceived quality and brand attitude play a partial mediating role. Emotional appeal prevails on consumers to transfer the emotions associated with new product characteristics to form a positive quality judgment. The followers make a purchase decision driven by the positive evaluation. Emotional appeal also stimulates the emotional response of consumers, and then causes them to have similar emotions towards the brands, thus forming positive brand attitudes. The subjective attitude further affecting the purchase intention or actual purchase behavior. Our findings suggest that informativeness and emotional appeal are proposed to affect the purchase intention through the sequential intervening factors (perceived quality and brand attitude), which indicates that whether informative or emotional content, they could positively influence consumers’ perception quality, and then affect their attitude towards the brand and improve their purchase intention.

4.1 Theoretical implications

This research bears several theoretical contributions. First, we focus on the FGC communication types related to the specific products[4], i.e., FGC of new products. Our research helps deepen the understanding of new product marketing on official social media pages, and provide further evidence for the influence of FGC on perceived quality and brand attitude[12,52].

Second, the results of the study explore the direct and indirect effects of FGC effectiveness on purchase intention, which also provide another valuable perspective into the study on FGC. From the perspective of informative and persuasive effect[18], we proposed two dimensions: informativeness and emotional appeal, which further expands the research scope of FGC.

Third, our study finds that brand attitude and perceived quality mediate the relationship between FGC effectiveness (informative and emotional appeal) and new product purchase intention. We confirm that informativeness and emotional appeal are important driving factors of perceived quality and brand attitude in the case of the market launch of new products on social media, which is comparatively new in the literature. The discovery expands the new direction of the research on FGC, that is, to examine consumers’ brand attitude and perceived quality.

4.2 Managerial implications

Apart from the theoretical implications emphasized above, this study also provides managerial contributions for those firms, which are devoting resources to their official brand pages to make the FGC more efficient. Our research results determine two antecedents of perceived quality of new products and brand attitude, and facilitate firms to comprehensively decipher how FGC effectiveness impact cognition, emotion, and behavior. So marketers and advertisers need to pay attention to manage FGC, to lead consumers’ purchase behavior and increase sales of new products.

For one thing, marketers should design to provide users with messages that they regard as useful information instead of a passing introduction (e.g., the new product has launched, welcomes general customers!). However, the informative contents encourage consumers to search for broader product-related information, which negatively affects customer price insensitivity[14]. Therefore, it is crucial to choose the right information for FGC. First, the pieces of information should help consumers be aware of the brand’s existence and brand characteristics. Second, managers should focus on the consumer’s perception and emotion, and make great efforts to improve their perceived quality and brand attitude. Inserting brand-related information (e.g., business philosophy) and providing external appropriate appearance information are good ways. For another, as an effective marketing method, emotional appeal could establish emotional connections with users and reach a good propaganda effect, which has been recognized by many scholars (e.g., Lee and Hong[22]). In the past, managers paid more attention to informativeness and ignored the emotional appeal when they promoted new products on social media. The direct effect of emotional appeal on new product purchase intention shows that FGC not only serves as an information provider, but also serves more as an emotional provider. Thus, it is important to be flexible in the use of emotional content to satisfy the emotional needs of consumers and prevail on them to change the purchase behavior. Moreover, the combination of emotional content and new products and brand characteristics helps raise users’ perception of quality and brand attitude, so as to achieve the purpose of promoting new products.

4.3 Limitations and future research

The findings showed in the paper has several limitations that are worthy of further study attention. First, our study focuses on informativeness and emotional appeal, which is the study of FGC effectiveness. Some other dimensions such as creativity, vividness could be examined as ideals. Second, the research design uses only one product type (backpack). Although the findings may be replicated for other product types, future research must clarify this important validation. Third, many firms create new product videos, and upload them to video platforms (e.g., YouTube) with highly cost-efficient and free exposure[25]. Future research could replace static images with dynamic videos to further explore the influence of FGC effectiveness. Fourth, our study do not take consumers’ attitudes towards FGC into account, which may affect the results of the experiment. Finally, we consider to further study the effect of FGC effectiveness on new product purchase intention by means of the text mining technology.

Acknowledgments

This work is supported by Humanities and Social Science Research Project of Ministry of Education of China (20YJC630138), Nature Science Research Project of Anhui province (2008085QG345), Basic Scientific Research Project of Central Universities (WK2040000023) and New Liberal Arts Fund of University of Science and Technology of China (YD2040002010).

Conflictofinterest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Authorinformation

ZHANGKedanis a master student of School of Management, University of Science and Technology of China, and her primary research interests are consumer behavior.

FANGWenpei(corresponding author) received his PhD degree from the University of Science and Technology of China , where he is currently conducting the postdoctoral work. His research mainly focuses on innovation management and consumer behavior.