• The Research Journal of the Costume Culture
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.88-103
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• 2017

The rapid growth in the popularity of social media sites has meant that social media has become an important communication channel for brands. Brands create brand pages on social media to cultivate positive and strong relationships with consumers. This study seeks to enhance our understanding of how fashion brand pages in social media foster consumer-brand relationships by exploring the factors that affect the development of consumer-brand relationships. Drawing on the parasocial interaction theory, this study proposes parasocial interaction as a key factor of this process. Specifically, this study proposes four antecedents (vividness, interactivity, social presence, and focused attention) of consumers' parasocial interaction with brand pages, which further affects consumer responses in terms of affective engagement and brand loyalty. An online survey was administered with consumers who have followed and visited at least one fashion brand page via a social networking site (SNS). Structural equation modeling revealed that consumers' perceptions of vividness, interactivity, social presence, and focused attention on a fashion brand page positively affected their feelings towards parasocial interaction with the brand page, which in turn led to their affective engagement with the brand page and consequent brand loyalty. These findings suggest that consumers build relationships of varying degrees with brand pages in a similar manner to that with people, which leads to their development of a positive relationship with the brand. This study concludes with discussions and practical implications.

• (The) Korean Journal of Advertising
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• v.29 no.6
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• pp.51-80
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• 2018

This study aims to investigate how the storytelling elements of brand webtoon has influence on developing brand webtoon users' parasocial interaction relationship and their attitude towards brand webtoon contents and word of mouth intention. The results of this study shows that parasocial interaction is strongly influenced by the sub-dimensions of digital storytelling components of brand webtoon (i.e., relevance, trustworthiness, clarity). More specifically, respondents who perceive that the given message of digital storytelling in brand webtoons is relevant to the brand, is trustworthy, and is clear to understand show a higher degree of parasocial interaction with the webtoon content and in turn, it has a strong positive influence on the attitude towards the brand webtoon. In sum, this study not only provides a theoretical foundation to understand how consumers develop parasocial interaction with brand webtoons in terms of the brand webtoon's digital storytelling, but this study has implications for practitioners who are interested in using a brand webtoon for marketing.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.270-281
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• 2021

The emergence of social media and technical development of smart phone allows media users to produce, share and spread a variety of contents, which results in a big change in their media usage pattern. Among those changes, the most prominent one is Youtube's powerful growth. Creators' enthusiastic content productions and users' active sharing actions are caused of the growth. Recently, creators give a powerful effect on users as social media influencer, and the practice of influencer marketing has been focused. This current study is examined the effects of parasocial interaction and relationship on brand attitude and purchase intention. Specially, parasical interaction is divided into identification, interest, and experience parasocial interaction, and the divisions of relationship are trustworthy, friendship, understanding, and commitment. As a result, interest and trustworthy are significant predictors of brand attitude. Also, experience parasocial interaction is negative and friendship is positive predictors of purchase intention. Theoretical and practical implication are discussed.

• Journal of Information Science Theory and Practice
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.15-23
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• 2022

Participants in real-time online sessions, be it (business) meetings, virtual school lessons, or social live streams, all engage in cyber social interactions. Unlike parasocial interactions, cyber social interactions are characterized by reciprocity and temporal proximity. In contrast to social interactions, they lack spatial proximity and bodily contact. This is a fairly new concept in information science that rose from technological advances and unprecedented circumstances (e.g., the rise of digital economy and knowledge workers being able to work remotely or, more recently, global lockdowns and contact restrictions). As a result, the past ways of working and socializing were transformed by making them, in some cases predominantly, virtual. Regarding the example of social live streaming we exhibit the importance of cyber social interactions for information behavior research. This conceptual article is a plea for information science to engage more in human-human online relations and interactions.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.139-160
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• 2017

Despite widespread awareness of the importance of a middle-aging and older consumer market, it is surprising that very little research has been conducted on their in-home shopping behavior. Therefore, this study focused on middle-aging and older female television home shoppers and examined the effects of persuasive mentions of the show host and parasocial interaction on social involvement, perceived loneliness, mood, perceived risk and unplanned buying tendency. A total of 109 middleaged and older female television shoppers responded. Results of path analysis revealed that persuasive mentions did not influence parasocial interaction. However, as middle-aging and older consumers more para-socially interacted with the host, they were likely to use television shopping for alleviating loneliness. Practical and theoretical implications were discussed.

• The Research Journal of the Costume Culture
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• v.26 no.5
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• pp.649-664
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• 2018

With the rapid growth of the Chinese cosmetics market and the continuous introduction of new products into the market, beauty videos generated by other consumers, that are by beauty vloggers, have become a major source of information for cosmetics consumers. With the popularity of beauty vlogs in China, beauty vloggers have become influencers who affect consumers' information processing and attitude development regarding cosmetic products and beauty routines. The current study aims to explore the characteristics of beauty vloggers that affect consumers' attitudes toward both the beauty vlogs and the products featured in those vlogs. Based on parasocial interaction theory, the study examines whether perceived characteristics of beauty vloggers influence consumers' perceived parasocial interaction, which in turn influences their attitudes. The study employs an online survey, which was administered to female consumers in China. Data from a total of 372 responses was used for analysis. Findings show that the perceived similarities to and perceived trustworthiness of vloggers have a significant impact on parasocial interactions, which influences consumer attitudes toward both the vlogs and the products shown in them. Perceived reliability and perceived attractiveness are shown to have a positive impact on consumer attitudes toward vlogs. Perceived expertise, attractiveness, similarity, and trustworthiness have all been shown to affect product attitudes. These results show that while beauty vlogs have a significant impact on consumers' decision-making processes, the perceived characteristics of beauty vloggers themselves are important to consumers in the development of their attitudes toward both vlogs and products.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.13-25
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• 2015

It seems crucial for entrepreneurship researchers to study how individual creativity is influenced by a number of entrepreneurship related traits. This is because individuals aiming to become entrepreneurs by launching their own start-ups need to enhance their creativity level to compete successfully in the target market. In the field of entrepreneurship studies, however, there is no literature about exploring the relationship between individual creativity, and entrepreneurship related constructs such as intrinsic motivation, parasocial interaction, prosocial motivation, and perspective taking. In this sense, our proposed research model focuses on filling the research void like this. To verify the proposed research model. we collected valid data from college students. To add rigor to our study, we allowed participants to view a talk show content where a successful entrepreneur was telling his story. Empirical test results were robust statistically enough to prove the validity of our proposed research model.

• Korean journal of communication and information
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• v.73
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• pp.7-34
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• 2015

This study attends to the effects of political entertainment as a newly emerging television genre on citizens' political talk. Particularly, this study suggests audience involvement and political information efficacy as key psychological factors that mediate the relationship between political entertainment and political discussion. More specifically, audience involvement was deemed as a conclusive concept that consists of such sub-dimensions as audience identification and parasocial interaction with program characters and transportation into the messages. Among 317 participants in an online survey, a total of 273 subjects, who had at least some viewing experience with political entertainment TV programs, were included in the final analysis. According to the findings, softer programs that piggyback political information on top of their entertainment content were more likely to increase viewers' identification and transportation. The viewer experience of identification further heightened the level of political information efficacy, which in turn positively contributed to one's willingness to participate in political talk and to hear the other side. It also appeared that political information efficacy significantly mediated the relationship between political entertainment viewing and political talk.