Abstract
Although online retailing is applying livestreaming to promote both hedonic and utilitarian products, the differential effectiveness of utilizing this tool across the two types of products is still unclear. With an online experiment, the study found that livestreaming (vs. traditional e-commerce) is more effective in boosting hedonic products while making no difference in increasing purchase intentions of utilitarian products. By running a moderated serial mediation analysis, the research also demonstrated the underlying mechanism that livestreaming could significantly enhance mental imagery quality and customer trust in hedonic rather than utilitarian products. Therefore, our research has discovered an important boundary condition for the livestreaming effect and also the mechanism for the success of utilizing livestreaming to boost hedonic products. Considering the indiscriminate use of livestreaming regardless of product types and the huge amounts of resources required to sustain livestreaming, the study not only provides a theoretical glimpse of where livestreaming is more effective and why, but also practical insights as to how to apply livestreaming to different types of products and how to leverage mental imagery and customer trust to achieve business growth in an online retailing context.
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