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1. Introduction
With the growth of technology and science, social media's focal point has shifted step-by-step from the conventional social contact media toward the e-commerce platform stage. As consumer expectations keep rising and e-commerce sales continue to surge, the popularity of online shopping and the widespread adoption of social networking sites (SNSs) have recently led to a new e-commerce paradigm called social commerce (s-commerce). S-commerce, considered a subset of e-commerce, uses social media to facilitate social interactions between consumers and brands, promoting the buying and selling of products and services (Abdelsalam et al., 2020; Hossain and Kim, 2020). Those trends pose a great challenge for traditional stores to keep up. Regardless of their positioning, leading famous brands has to rethink how to sell their products (McKinsey, 2019). In China, the WeChat Mini Program, which is integrated into China's largest social media app, WeChat, has become the most popular S-commerce platform.
Social media, one of the most effective and powerful marketing tools in China, is changing public lifestyles and offering new ways for marketers to communicate with consumers, giving social media brand communities a unique competitive advantage and co-creating value and increase customer engagement (Martín-Consuegra et al., 2018; Nambisan and Baron, 2007; Zhao, 2019; Riley, 2020). There are currently 1.04 bn Chinese who use social media, representing a penetration rate of 72%, which is a much higher number than that of the global market 49% (Campaignchina, 2020). As one of the most popular social mobile platforms in China, with over 1 bn monthly active users, WeChat can turn into a crucial proportion of brands' digital online promoting marketing programmers. According to Bain and Company (2018), since 2015, the top 40 luxury brands in China have nearly doubled the portion of their marketing budget devoted to digital, spending between 40 and 70% of that on WeChat. Also the average growth rate of WeChat advertisements by the luxury industry has exceeded 90% in the past five years (VALUECHINA, 2020).
With the WeChat Mini Program's introduction in 2017, it became a rapidly growing trading channel in China, which recorded over 300 m daily active users in 2019, with usage up 45% from the year before. By the end of August 2019, the number of WeChat Mini Programs...