报告人简介：毛慧芳，美国爱荷华州立大学教授，研究兴趣主要包括消费者行为研究，在国际期刊Journal of Marketing Research、Journal of Consumer Research、Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science、Journal of Consumer Psychology等发表论文近10篇。

报告简介：Marketing communications frequently feature human faces to enhance persuasive outcomes. However, researchers and practitioners have largely overlooked the influence of facial prominence, defined as the ratio between the area of the spokesperson’s face and the total area of the marketing display, on consumer responses to communication messages. Across seven laboratory experiments and two studies analyzing large-scale data from major online retailers, the current research demonstrates that consumers respond more positively to marketing communications featuring relatively low (vs. high) facial prominence of the spokesperson. We provide support for a serial mediation model where facial prominence affects perceptions of both dominance and warmth, which subsequently influence a consumer’s desire to affiliate with the spokesperson. Furthermore, we examine how artificial intelligence (AI), celebrity spokesperson, consumers’ trait anxiety levels, and product categories serve as boundary conditions for the observed effects. The theoretical and managerial implications of our findings are discussed.