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Introduction
In the pervasive and boundless digital landscape of the twenty-first century, social viewing is defined as the process through which consumers engage in shared electronic viewership and content-guided interactions irrespective of time and location. Traditional research on social viewing originated in the mass media and communication literature, where it was conceptualized as in-person TV coviewing (Sapolsky and Zillmann, 1978) and technology-mediated TV coviewing (social TV, “two-screen viewing” or “multi-screen viewing”) (Johns, 2012; Shin, 2013; Shin and Biocca, 2017; Shin and Kim, 2015). While social TV viewing is an interesting phenomenon, its implications for marketing practitioners are largely limited because viewership is strictly tied to television broadcast. Recently, the way consumers view and share content has changed. One prominent change over the past decade is the growing popularity of livestreaming online videos as a social activity (Weisz et al., 2007). Currently, video content dominates roughly 74 per cent of internet traffic (Stelzner, 2016). More importantly, livestreaming is outpacing the rise of different forms of online video viewership, with a 113 per cent increase in advertising growth yearly (Golum, 2016).
Consumers are gravitating toward online viewing, which makes digital social viewing[1] particularly relevant for marketing studies. Researchers point to the possibility of a connection between consumer participation in social viewing and consumers’ searches for an authentic viewing experience, which firms can use to encourage subsequent engagement (Goulding, 2000; Hede et al., 2014). In fact, scholars have recently called for more investigations on consumer-based authenticity (Gannon and Prothero, 2016), an under-researched concept compared to brand-based authenticity (Alexander, 2009; Fritz et al., 2017; Guèvremont and Grohmann, 2016). The notion of consumer-based authenticity is that consumers are avidly searching for authentic consumption experiences (Gannon and Prothero, 2016). Given that digital environments are unconventional platforms for consumer interactions (Ozuem et al., 2008), it is reasonable to wonder if and how firm-initiated digital social viewing strategies (livestreaming vs pre-recorded) influence authentic consumer viewing experiences and consequential behavioral intentions.
A livestreaming social viewing strategy utilizes live video content for marketing purposes. This allows for real-time shared viewership and interaction among consumers through live chats and instant messages. In contrast, a pre-recorded social viewing strategy involves using previously recorded marketing video content. In this case, shared viewership and interaction...