How brand live streaming affects brand attachment in social commerce: from the perspective of IT affordances

While promoting the prosperity of China’s social commerce in recent years, celebrity live streaming has been criticized for not being conducive to establishing a strong emotional relationship between brands and consumers. Our study focuses on the non-celebrity live streaming held by brands, called brand live streaming. Our research regards brand live streaming as a new form of brand community. According to IT affordances, We construct a structural model to examine whether and how brand live streaming affects Chinese consumers’ brand attachment. We empirically test the model through the questionnaire distributed to brand live streaming viewers. Our results show that metavoicing affordance, guidance shopping affordance, and trading affordance positively affect consumers’ brand attachment, while visibility affordance does not affect consumers’ brand attachment. In addition, this paper also reveals that symbolic value and sense of community mediate the relationship between IT affordances and brand attachment in brand live streaming. Our study validates the importance of brand live streaming as a viable social commerce form and provides marketers with ways to build brand attachment.