Creating a parasocial relationship on social media: luxury brands playing cute in China

This study provides evidence that ‘cuteness’ glamorizes Chinese consumers’ affective experience with a luxury brand in a social media context. Using systematically developed advertising stimuli and a nonstudent sample of 723 Chinese residents, the main experiment demonstrates that cute images featured in a social media post can engage consumers in a ‘quasi social interaction’ with a luxury brand with relatively low recognition. Once initiated,...