The influence of self-construal on frequency of user activities and advertising involvement in Msg-SN

ABSTRACT

The messenger-based social network (Msg-SN), e.g. WeChat Moments, has emerged as a new type of social networking with unique characteristics. Msg-SN plays a strikingly important role in people’s daily lives and has gradually become a battleground for advertisers to win consumers. This is especially the case in China. Unlike conventional social network sites (SNSs), Msg-SN offers a semi-closed space in which traditional advertising strategy based on Key Opinion Leaders may become infeasible. Drawing from self-construal theory, this study offers a new angle to understand the antecedents of advertising involvement in the context of Msg-SN. It conducted an empirical study with respondents from users of WeChat Moments, which reveals the different impacts of each facet of a user’s self-construal, including interdependent self-construal (InterSC), independent self-construal (IndepSC) and individualist self-construal (IndivSC), on adverting involvement, partially mediated by frequency of user activities. This study enriches the research of advertising involvement in the context of Msg-SN from a new angle. It also offers practical implications for marketers to achieve highly targeted advertising according to psychographic segmentations.

KEYWORDS:

• Msg-SN
• self-construal
• frequency of user activities
• advertising involvement

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Shanghai Planning Projects of Philosophy and Social Science: [Grant Number 2020BGL021].