Research on the Implementation Mechanism of Live‑Streaming E‑Commerce and Social Media Content Marketing for DTC Brands — From the Perspective of Media Affordances and Multi‑Stage Conversion Chain

Abstract

Existing research on DTC marketing mostly decouples the marketing functions of social media and live‑streaming e‑commerce. Prior literature focuses on short‑term transaction conversion yet ignores the stage‑asymmetric effects of media affordances across consumers’ full‑link journey, and thus cannot explain the industry pain point of “soaring live‑stream GMV alongside low repurchase and brand loyalty” among cross‑border health consumer goods. Combining media affordance theory and parasocial interaction theory, this paper constructs a multi‑stage conversion analytical framework and establishes a four‑stage user conversion chain. Empirical analysis is conducted based on multi‑source data including social‑media texts, live‑streaming datasets, consumer questionnaires and enterprise operational panel data. The results show that pre‑live‑stream social‑media priming significantly improves users’ brand awareness; social media and live‑streaming present a temporal complementary relationship, which effectively boosts user retention and repurchase without inhibiting short‑term GMV. This study verifies the validity of the chained‑mediation mechanism, identifies three high‑user‑value realization configurations (Treem, J. W., & Leonardi, P. M., 2016), and clarifies the dual‑media synergy mechanism and its implementation boundaries. It provides a quantitative reference paradigm for marketing practices of cross‑border health DTC brands.