How to cultivate loyal online customers: the role of emotional labor strategy detection in the context of live-commerce

Abstract Live commerce has become one of the mainstream retail channels, and thus the anchor who connects live commerce and customers has become significant in cultivating loyal customers. Unlike existing literature that focuses on the relationship between anchors’ behavioral characteristics and customer attitudes, this study starts with the anchors’ emotional characteristics to investigate the impact of their emotional labor strategies on customer attitude loyalty. Based on ‘emotion as social information theory,’ this study develops a relationship model among customers’ detection of anchors’ emotional labor strategy, perceived customer orientation and customer attitude loyalty. It also explores the effect of the accuracy of customers’ detection of emotional labor strategy on the relationship among the three variables. This study collected paired questionnaires from 42 anchors and 331 customers engaged in the live commerce industry, and conducted hypothesis testing through regression analysis. The results reveal that in the context of live-commerce: (1) Customers’ detection of anchors’ emotional labor strategy positively affects customer attitude loyalty, where perceived customer orientation mediates the effect; (2) The accuracy of customers’ detection of deep acting positively moderates the relationship between the detection of the anchor’s deep acting and perceived customer orientation, whereas the accuracy of customers’ detection of surface acting has the opposite effect; (3) The accuracy of customers’ detection of deep acting positively moderates the mediating effect of perceived customer orientation in the relationship between the detection of anchors’ deep acting and customer attitude loyalty, whereas the accuracy of customers’ detection of surface acting has the opposite effect. Taking the perspective of the anchor’s emotional characteristics, this study not only reveals the mechanism and boundary conditions of how the detection of anchors’ emotional labor strategy affects customer attitude loyalty, but also provides important practical insights for live commerce companies to cultivate customer loyalty behavior.