The Impact of "Seeding" Content Features on Purchase Conversion of New Consumer Brands on Xiaohongshu

Wenxing Wang

doi:10.54691/nmdsyt57

Authors

Wenxing Wang Stevens Institute of Technology, School of business, Shenzhen, China

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.54691/nmdsyt57

Keywords:

Seeding content, content features, purchase conversion, new consumer brands, Xiaohongshu, elaboration likelihood model.

Abstract

The practice of "content seeding" on social e-commerce platforms has been identified as one of the most crucial tactics in acquiring users for emerging consumer brands, but limited fine-grained empirical insights into the impact of specific content attributes on purchase conversion behaviors still exist. Following the theoretical perspective of the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), this paper dissects the content features of seeding notes on Xiaohongshu into two dimensions, namely, informational features and emotional features, and then explores their impacts on purchase conversion behaviors, while examining the moderating role played by user interaction level and brand awareness as boundary conditions. Data were collected from 2,200 seeding posts released in 2024 and involving 15 emerging consumer brands in three categories of products. The measurements of content attributes were obtained based on the application of natural language processing and manual content coding methods, and statistical hypotheses were tested using hierarchical multiple regression models. The findings show that information attributes and emotion attributes have significantly positive impacts on purchase conversion metrics, among which information attributes have a higher impact. User interaction level positively moderates the conversion impact of informational features but is insignificant in moderating the conversion impact of emotional features. Compared with high-awareness brands, low-awareness brands display more sensitivity to information attributes and emotion attributes in terms of purchase conversion.

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