Strong tie or weak tie? Exploring the impact of group-formation gamification mechanisms on user emotional anxiety in social commerce

ABSTRACT

Customers can raise various aspects of concerns and anxieties during their participation in gamified social mobile marketing campaigns. To gain insights into how to address these anxieties, this research explores the impact of group-formation gamification mechanisms on users’ emotional anxiety and their intentions to participate in such campaigns. A research model depicting group-formation gamification strategies, user anxieties and participation intentions in gamified social mobile marketing campaigns was proposed and examined through experiments involving 232 participants, which were triangulated by electroencephalogram (EEG) tests and follow-up interviews. The results of this study showed that compared with weak-tie group-formation mechanisms, strong-tie mechanisms can result in a lower level of user emotional anxiety, including reductions in user manipulation anxiety, user privacy anxiety and social image anxiety, which in turn led to higher user intentions to participate in the gamified social mobile marketing campaign. Moreover, it was found that user gender and disposable incomes had significant moderating effects on user anxiety during their interactions with the campaign.

KEYWORDS:

• Social mobile marketing campaign
• gamification
• user emotional anxiety
• intention to participate
• strong tie
• weak tie

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 71771046, 71671033 and 71971052]; the Humanities and Social Sciences Foundation of China MOE [grant number 17YJC630061].