How do e-commerce anchors' characteristics influence consumers’ impulse buying? An emotional contagion perspective

Live streaming e-commerce is a novel type of shopping that induces widespread instances of emotional, impulse buying behavior: immediate purchases driven by strong emotional responses. This research aims to provide an in-depth analysis of how the characteristics of anchors in affect consumers' impulse buying from the perspective of emotional contagion. Based on the attitude-behavior-context theoretical framework and the emotional contagion theory, this study builds a research framework, aiming to explore the influence mechanism of anchors' characteristics on the consumers' impulse buying behavior, and further explores how viewer engagement in the live-broadcast room affects consumers' emotional experiences of anchors. In addition, artificial neural networks were used to rank the relative importance of various influencing factors. The findings from analyzing 327 valid questionnaires revealed that the pleasure emotion is the key influencing factor driving consumer impulse buying, which is facilitated by the anchors' similarity, attractiveness, professionalism, and interactivity. The neural network model also confirmed that anchors' attractiveness had the greatest positive influence on consumers' pleasure emotions during the process of triggering consumers' impulse buying, followed by anchors' similarity, professionalism and interactivity. However, further research showed that the negative moderation of viewer engagement could reduce the influence of anchors' similarity (P < 0.1) and attractiveness (P < 0.05) on consumers' pleasure emotions. Thus, e-commerce anchors can guide consumers to resonate emotionally and increase their desire to purchase by displaying personal charm and sharing common interests. Especially in the broadcast room with low viewer engagement, it is necessary to pay attention to the emotional experience of consumers and to increase the viewer's participation through more interaction and guidance.