In spite of the significant differences between video advertising and short video advertising in terms of production methods and communication forms, they both essentially reconstruct product attributes, functions, and other business information through audio-visual symbols. In addition, considering that short video research is in the ascendant, it is advisable to refer to the previous studies on video advertising so as to explore the advertising features that can promote communication and consumer purchase. According to the content feature framework of online video advertising shared by consumers (Tellis et al., 2019), informational content, emotional content, and commercial content are the most important driving factors. These factors are controlled by advertisers and have been tested true both theoretically and empirically.

In the classic integrative models of advertising, informational route and emotional route are two main paths to influence consumer attitudes (Macinnis and Jaworski, 1989). They can have a differentiated impact on searching, sharing, rating, and purchasing (Yoo and MacInnis, 2005; Lee and Hong, 2016; Akpinar and Berger, 2017; Tellis et al., 2019; Guitart and Stremersch, 2021). First, information focused content aims to convey information cues related to product attributes, price information, promotional activities, and brand events (Chandrasekaran et al., 2017), which usually involves a propagating argument or factual description (Tellis et al., 2019; Guitart and Stremersch, 2021). Obviously, by objectively describing the advantages of the brand or product, the informational content of advertisement satisfies the appeal of consumers and improves brand beliefs (Chandy et al., 2001). Some scholars also believe that informational content is crucial in persuasion and communication (Hsieh et al., 2012). Consumers will regard this kind of information as fairer and less manipulative, and the positive inference will increase brand search and purchase intention (Chandrasekaran et al., 2017). However, Tellis et al. (2019) takes the fact-centered informational content as particularly dull and boring, and even irritating unless in such high-risk situations that involves new products or high prices, which results in lower advertising sharing willingness. In response to the above contradictory conclusion, Akpinar and Berger (2017) proposed that if consumers are motivated to actively deal with advertising information, they are to obtain brand and product knowledge that help them to make purchasing decisions, and ultimately improve their evaluation of informational content. Therefore, the informational content of advertisements provides consumers access to awareness of useful or unique features of the product in some special situations (Yoo and MacInnis, 2005), and, as a result, promotes positive consumer attitudes and behaviors.

Secondly, emotion-focused content aims at arousing the emotional response of consumers (Chandrasekaran et al., 2017), which includes positive or negative emotions (Tellis et al., 2019). Different from the complex impact of informative content on consumer response, advertisements with emotional appeal are believed to be more persuasive (Berger and Milkman, 2012; Teixeira et al., 2012; Nelson-Field et al., 2013; Nikolinakou and King, 2018). In fact, emotional content produces many important advertising results, such as viewing time (Teixeira et al., 2012) and advertising sharing (Akpinar and Berger, 2017; Tellis et al., 2019), purchase intention (Lee and Hong, 2016), and sales (Chandy et al., 2001; Guitart and Stremersch, 2021). Furthermore, previous literature explores the advertising characteristics that stimulate the emotional experience of consumers. For example, Tellis et al. (2019) found that drama, plot, characters, and surprise are positive factors that trigger emotions and sharing activities, while mood and music can build emotions and orientations (Yoo and MacInnis, 2005). More importantly, Liu et al. (2018) found that effective editing of rhythm, sequence, and sound in a short video can control the emotional experience of consumers and improve their willingness to watch. Generally speaking, except under some risky conditions, the emotional characteristics displayed in the ads will produce a greater impact on consumer behavior.

In addition, distinct from the content produced by non-marketers, commercial nature and persuasive intention are important characteristics of advertising. Tellis et al. (2019) defined commercial content as the one that influence consumer support to branded product or service, such as a brand logo on an advertising screen. It is worth noting that, the persuasive knowledge activated when the advertisers use commercial content to establish positive brand association for the consumers will also attract the attention of consumers to the features of implanted products, which in return results in the undervaluation or resistance of consumers to persuasive information (Friestad and Wright, 1994), and even unwillingness to share (Akpinar and Berger, 2017). Worse still, the significant commercial motivation of video advertising reduces the effectiveness of content characteristics that originally tend to promote the willingness of consumers to share (Tellis et al., 2019). In summary, the higher the intention of video advertising, the lower the willingness of consumers to share.

Customer inspiration is the specific application of the classical social psychology concept “inspiration” in the marketing situation (Thrash and Elliot, 2003, 2004), i.e., a temporary activation state that prompts the customer to move from a marketing-guided mindset to an internal pursuit of consumption-related goals (Böttger et al., 2017). In this article, the concept of “short video customer inspiration” is used as the specific representation of customer inspiration in the context of short video advertising. Further, Böttger et al. (2017) proposed that customer inspiration is a second-order construct consisting of ‘inspired-by’ and ‘inspired-to’ states. The inspired-by activation state relates to the reception of a marketing-induced new idea and the shift in customer awareness toward new possibilities. Comparatively, the inspired-to state relates to the intrinsic pursuit of new ideas and consumption-related goals. Many studies have confirmed that concerns about customer inspiration are valuable in predicting such positive behavior, emotion, and attitude as increased purchasing intention and purchasing behavior (Winterich et al., 2019), pleasure and surprise (Böttger et al., 2017), and customer satisfaction and loyalty (Herhausen et al., 2019).

By combing relevant literature, a large number of empirical analyses have been conducted on the sources of customer inspiration, and their results provide certain implications for research on the triggering mechanism of customer inspiration in short videos. Customer inspiration is not spontaneous but induced by external stimuli of intrinsic value (Thrash and Elliot, 2004). Böttger et al. (2017) proposed that the most inspirational marketing stimulus contains three source features, namely, the provision of inspirational content, appeals to use the imagination, and elicitation of an approach motivation. It is found in some empirical studies that utilitarian and hedonic content have a positive impact on customer inspiration (Izogo and Mpinganjira, 2020). For example, novel and vivid advertising information helps consumers acquire new ideas and imagination, thus triggering customer inspiration (Böttger et al., 2017; Winterich et al., 2019). In addition, advertising information targeted to the specific emotional demands of consumers can also be inspiring. Bischof et al. (2020) observed that the desire of consumers for exploration is contented by the astonishing subscription service, and they are therefore inspired to try new things. Similarly, donation advertisements that evoke strength emotion (Liang et al., 2016) and travel destinations that lead to attachment emotion (Khoi et al., 2019) also have unique enlightenment because they can arouse the inner interest and motivation of consumers to pursue their goals.

From the above literature review, it can be seen that: (1) previous studies on advertising are based on the conceptual framework of informative, emotional, and commercial content, deeply exploring the factors that influence the effectiveness of advertising. Most of the discussions focus on advertising attitude, brand evaluation, viewing behavior, purchase intention, sharing intention, sales, and other dependent variables. However, as mentioned above, customer inspiration that includes cognitive activation and intention-driven components is more helpful to resolve the urgent problems in short video advertising, that is, how to attract and maintain the attention of consumers and prompt them to make a positive response. Unfortunately, there is no research taking customer inspiration as the key concept to explore the effectiveness of short video advertising, which should have been a new perspective in the field. (2) A number of advertising features related to information, emotion, and commerce have been identified, and marketing drivers with heuristic traits (informative and emotional) have also been extensively validated. However, the short video, as a new media, is different from other social media applications in terms of content generation, display, browsing and transmission (such as graphic posts, long videos, micro-films, and live broadcasts). Moreover, customer inspiration largely depends on the situation that generates it. The existing characteristics of inspiration may not be applicable to short video advertising. It is therefore necessary to use the current content framework to explore new factors that influence the generation of inspiration of short video customers and its triggering mechanism.

This study aims to explore the triggering mechanism of customer inspiration in short videos. In view of the lack of mature theories and studies on this issue, the qualitative research method is given priority. Specifically, the Repertory Grid Technique (RGT) has been adopted in research interviews and data collection. RGT originates from the personal construct theory in cognitive psychology. The constructs accumulated in life are used to explain and predict the events around (Kelly, 1955). Kelly (1955) pointed out that an individual only has a limited number of constructs that are bipolar in nature. For example, the description of consumers of short video advertisements can be ‘interesting or boring,’ ‘novel or plain,’ ‘lively or bald,’ etc. Therefore, RGT is mainly used to extract individual constructs that judge complex things or phenomena (Kelly, 1963). This is especially appropriate for exploring the topics whose answers are indirectly known and implicit knowledge that cannot be conveyed directly (Goffin et al., 2006).

Although customer inspiration is not essentially a mystic experience (Thrash and Elliot, 2004), it is still challenging for consumers to specify the concept of or access to inspiration (Rauschnabel et al., 2019). In addition, compared to other qualitative methods that are easily affected by subjective bias of researchers in data collection, RGT grants respondents the maximum freedom to comment on a topic so as to ensure the authenticity and accuracy of the data (Goffin, 2002), and therefore has been gradually used as an effective qualitative instrument in marketing research (Lemke et al., 2011; Macdonald et al., 2016; Kawaf, 2017). Recent studies also showed that RGT is particularly applicable for the study of the cognitive and emotional experience of digital consumers (Kawaf and Istanbulluoglu, 2019). It is worth mentioning that some novel methods similar to RGT (such as Dynamic EMCUD and VODKA) have recently been developed to obtain dynamic knowledge that is constantly updated and evolving with environmental changes (Lin et al., 2008; Tseng and Lin, 2009). Other methods, like ZMET, were used to resolve important problems in marketing practice by integrating RGT in the method (Coulter et al., 2001). Obviously, in these methods personal construct theory and RGT serve as crucial access to consumers tacit knowledge, which also confirms that RGT allows a better solution to problems on cognitive decision making. In general, RGT helps to uncover the source and cognitive process of inspiration when consumers are exposed to short video advertising.

As a unique qualitative research method, RGT is characterized by numerous and time-consuming interview steps, which makes it possible to extract enough constructs from 15 to 25 samples to meet the research needs (Tan and Hunter, 2002). With a theoretical sampling method, the interviewees in this study are selected on the basis of judgments of the researchers and research questions. Specifically, the respondents must have high intensity both in browsing short videos and of purchasing relevant products or services on the short video platform. According to the statistical report of “2019 White Paper on Marketing Strategy of China’s Short Video Enterprises” released by iResearch, the proportion of male and female users of the short video applications of China in 2019 is close to 1:1 and the user group is mainly under the age of 24. Therefore, this study also balances the gender, age, and other characteristics of respondents according to the portrait characteristics of current short video users. In this study, 25 short video users were interviewed (female 48%, M_age = 22.4). The interview was conducted face-to-face, with each interview lasting from 33 to 97 min (M = 56) (Table 1). Ultimately, the requirement of theoretical saturation has been reached, that there were no other new ideas from the respondents.

In the formal interview, researchers first explained the meaning of customer inspiration to the respondents to ensure that they can understand the concept properly. The respondents were informed of the two parts in the experience of customer inspiration, namely, to obtain new ideas or possibilities from the external marketing stimuli, thus experiencing a ‘flashing’ moment of being enlightened as shown in the words like “Aha!,” “Eureka!,” etc., and to generate motivation to implement new ideas, such as the strong desire to buy or use products. The specific interview steps are as follows. First of all, each respondent needs to watch the 16 highly inspiring short video advertisements (elements)¹ prepared by the researchers one by one, and to select from them three ads that can stimulate inspiration and three that cannot. The selected six ads are written on a separate card in digital form. Secondly, according to the highly respected triads method (Kelly, 1963), three cards with short video names are randomly presented to the respondents who are then required to answer the following question: “In terms of your choice, which two of the three short video ads are more similar and different from the third one? And what are the similarities?”. Answers to this question will lead to a bipolar construct, the positive construct being recorded on the right side of a prepared square and entitled as a novel construct, while the negative one on the left side as a plain one. Next, in order to establish links between elements and constructs, after discussing the specific meaning of the first construct, the respondents need to evaluate all the six short video advertisements selected before with a Likert 7-point scale. In this study, a Likert 7-point scale was adopted because it could give the respondents more freedom to rank elements (Tan and Hunter, 2002). It is worth noting that the constructs extracted by the triple method are more concrete, thus differentiating from the inspiration that is more abstract. To this end, laddering interview technique is applied to elicit higher-order, more abstract constructs that are closer to the target in the personal construct system (Reynolds and Gutman, 1988). In particular, after the respondents answering the initial questions, a series of laddering questions will be raised to establish higher-level constructs, like “Why is this important to you?,” “What does that mean to you?,” “What do you think about it?”. So far, an integrated triple discussion has been completed. A complete grid example is shown in Table 3, consisting of elements, construct, and connection (Easterby-Smith, 1980). The process where the constructs have been formulated with the method of triads and laddering is repeatedly applied with the new cards until the respondent fails to produce any new construct. During the whole experiment, no construct that has been mentioned in the previous step is allowed to be repeated. The possibility of creating new construct from each triad encourages the respondents to think deeply about the connotation of customer inspiration in the short video. Reger (1990) disagreed with the necessity of repeating all the triads, for in most of the cases 7–10 groups are enough to exhaust all the constructs of the interviewee. The number of triads in this study ranges from 5 to 13 (M = 8.44, SD = 1.64), which confirms the above conclusions. In the square example of Table 3, the first respondent produced five constructs.

A small number of constructs in the interview are same in meaning but slightly different in expression. After carefully examining all the text content and grids, two researchers in charge of data collection identified and standardized the duplicate constructs. For example, 15 interviewees admitted that they are inspired when the short video ads provided a sensory experience of audio-visual conformity. But they used ‘audio-visual conformity,’ ‘audio-visual coordination,’ ‘audio-visual match,’ ‘audio-visual fit,’ and other expressions in the positive construct pole. The inconsistency of this kind was also found in the negative construct pole. To the end, ‘audio-visual conformity’ was determined as the standard construct name. Through such a process of standardization, 279 initial constructs have been simplified to 50. Furthermore, in order to ensure the significance of the analyzed constructs, the constructs that had been mentioned by at least three interviewees (≥12%) were finally retained, with a total of 39 constructs.

Based on the inherent meaning of and interaction between constructs, 39 standardized constructs were categorized in accordance with their themes. This categorization strictly followed the four steps recommended by the prior research (Goffin and Koners, 2011), namely, identifying categories, allocating constructs to those categories, tabulating the results, and establishing the reliability of the category system. In the first step, each of the 39 constructs was written on a separate card, including its name, polar position, and typical description of the construct. Next, the preliminary categories composed of names, definitions, and construct distributions were established by discussion between two researchers who were in charge of data collection. At the same time, an independent researcher was invited to classify these cards, and the consistency of the two classification results was calculated accordingly. The reliability index between the coders was 74.36%, which was obtained by dividing the number of the constructs distributed in one category by the total number of constructs. Although higher than the critical level of 70%, it is advisable to modify the definition and distribution of categories to remove ambiguity. Therefore, the second independent researcher classified the constructs based on the modified names and definitions, and got the reliability index of 84.62%, which was much higher than 70%. With the reliable result, 39 constructs were eventually allocated into 18 categories (Table 4).

Goffin et al. (2006) proposed that frequency and variability are important indicators to the establishment of key constructs. Firstly, the frequency indicator is satisfied when the construct is articulated by at least 25% of respondents. In this part, 14 important constructs met the frequency threshold. Secondly, the variability indicator is used to quantify the relative importance of a construct due to the significant difference in the evaluation of construct, and thus effective in distinguishing highly inspiring short video ads from low inspiring ones. Specifically, the variability of a construct is a measure of the scale of ratings compared to all the other constructs. The higher the variability of a construct is, the greater is its importance to the respondent. The variability of a given construct represents its contribution to the total variance. Additionally, since the measurement of variability depends on the number of constructs contained in each independent square, the variation value of each construct needs to be standardized. In this study, Average Normalized Variability (ANV) of constructs was 8.96%. When the ANV of a construct is greater than this threshold, this construct can be used to distinguish different types of short video ads, i.e., whether they inspire customers. In all, 25 important constructs were found to meet the requirements of the variability threshold. Furthermore, a key construct is defined as the one to satisfy both the threshold of frequency and variability. Accordingly, nine key constructs were identified as the most convincing criterion to distinguish short video ads with varying degrees of inspiration.

During the interview, the respondents were often found to spontaneously elaborate their preference to a construct pole, which, in many cases, helps to establish a very clear causal path (Lemke et al., 2011). In the absence of spontaneous interpretation, the laddering interview technique also helped to refine the attribution process (Reynolds and Gutman, 1988). The study results reveal that the cognitive processing caused by inspiring informational content characteristic and the emotional response aroused by the emotional content characteristic are the internal mechanisms for the stimulation of customer inspirations in short videos (Figure 1).

Admittedly, inspiring informational content and emotional content stimulate customer inspiration in most cases, there still exist some factors that can affect the frequency and intensity of customer inspiration in short videos (Thrash and Elliot, 2003, 2004). Research on video advertising have found that only when the risk on product or purchase is high will the informational content positively affect the sharing of advertising (Tellis et al., 2019). Similarly, this study identifies an important personal factor in the formation of short video customer inspiration–personal involvement. Personal involvement includes two constructs, namely, relevance in interest and relevance in demand, both of which meet the criteria to be key constructs. According to the theory of involvement, personal involvement reflects not only the degree of association between consumers and informational content, but that between consumers and emotional content (Zaichkowsky, 1994). Therefore, consumers with high involvement have the strongest response to the inspiring informational content and emotional content, which improves the possibility that customer inspiration will be triggered. On the contrary, consumers with low involvement are impervious to creative new ideas. As one of the respondents said, “The first two videos are in line with my preferences and interests. I really like the art with lighting effect. I like porphyra rice and I once made it myself. Such content will naturally fill my imagination and make me feel better” (Respondent 20). Therefore, the following proposition is obtained.

With a focus on the source of customer inspiration of short videos and its cognitive psychological process, 25 short video users were interviewed by RGT qualitative research method. Through the analysis of text and grid data, this article constructs the formation path model of short video customer inspiration, and systematically discusses the source, triggering mechanism and influencing factors of short video customer inspiration. The main conclusions are as follows: the inspiring informational content characteristics in short video ads include richness, reliability, vividness, and fluency, while the emotional content characteristics include fun, novelty, and narrativity. However, the commercial content characteristics of short video ads prevent customers from being inspired. Secondly, cognitive processing such as presence, processing fluency, perceived innovation and perceived convenience caused by informational content characteristics and emotional responses such as curiosity, surprise, and pleasure aroused by emotional content characteristics are the internal mechanism that stimulates customer inspiration in short videos. In addition, personal involvement enhances the relationship between inspiring content characteristic and customer inspiration.

First of all, this article creatively takes customer inspiration as the key construct to explore the effectiveness of short video ads, and provides a new theoretical perspective and methodological instruction for researches and practice on advertising. Specifically, with a different perspective from the previous researches that focused on the key variables such as viewing time (Teixeira et al., 2012), sharing willingness (Berger and Milkman, 2012; Akpinar and Berger, 2017), purchase intention (Lee and Hong, 2016; Liu et al., 2018), sharing behavior (Tellis et al., 2019), sales (Chandy et al., 2001; Guitart and Stremersch, 2021), etc., this article finds that in the current fast-paced and ever-shortening customer journey, customer inspiration helps to explore the importance of short videos in online marketing. Consumers’ attention in short video ads is more effectively converted into a positive purchasing behavior.

Secondly, RGT is applied in this article to sort out the content characteristics that influence the generation of customer inspiration in short videos, the cognitive psychological process triggered by customer inspiration, and the key influencing factors. The findings enrich the existing advertising content feature framework and literature on customer inspiration. In specific, the content feature framework of online video advertising constructed by Tellis et al. (2019) provides detailed instruction on how to design advertisements that drive consumers’ sharing behavior. In spite of the current fad of short video ads, this article further identifies some new information (richness, reliability, vividness, and fluency), and emotional (novelty, fun, and narrativity) content characteristics in the hot trend of short video advertising. It is also found that personal involvement affects the effectiveness of these content features, which, to some extent, supplements the original conceptual framework. Next, responding to the call on contextual interpretation, application (Thrash et al., 2014), and source exploration of inspiration (Liang et al., 2016; Böttger et al., 2017), this article extensively studies the various sources of customer inspiration in short videos, specifies its cognitive process, and developed insights into its formation process.

The research findings may help to resolve some practical problems on how to attract and maintain the attention of consumers and prompt them to make positive response. For online marketers, it is necessary in the design of short videos to have an overall consideration of the inspiring (information, emotion, commerce) content characteristics, increasing richness and reliability of informational content and presenting the information vividly and smoothly. Such practice is conducive to stimulating the cognitive process of customer inspiration. Similarly, emotional content that can arouse consumers positive emotional reactions (curiosity, surprise, pleasure) should also be designed, like adding the funny and novel things to short video ads or displaying presenting the experience of product in a narrative way. In addition, marketers should try to reduce the commercial intention of short-video ads such as sales labels with persuasive bias, thus attracting the attention of consumers to the theme of advertising. Therefore, by increasing the probability of inspiration, consumers can be encouraged to actively participate in short video ads, such as browsing, sharing, purchasing, and other engagement behaviors. The short video platforms can increase the exposure rate of high inspiring short video ads by adjusting the content distribution algorithm so as to attract more consumers for businesses. Furthermore, user portrait algorithm can be improved by collecting data related to user involvement (demands, interests) to increase the frequency and intensity of inspiration, which will greatly improve the rate of purchase conversion of short video ads.

As an exploratory study, there inevitably exist insufficiencies that need to be further investigated. Firstly, although the selected samples are representative and the number of samples also meets the requirements of theoretical saturation, the small sample size is not large enough to provide us with sufficient evidence for more convincing conclusions. Future studies should employ a large-scale questionnaire survey to test the reliability of the constructed conceptual model. Second, despite the preciseness of strategies in the selection of short video ads, subjective involvement in the procedure may reduce the validity to some extent. Therefore, attempts can be made to include emotion or sensation analysis of comment text in short video ads in order to sort out the most effective inspiring stimuli for experiment. In addition, the proposed content characteristics (information, emotion, business) that affect the customer inspiration can be well manipulated in the experiment. In future studies, the causal relations in the six research propositions and the impact of each factor on customer inspiration experience should be analyzed and verified by experiments. Finally, while customer inspiration may well explain how short video ads attract attention and motivate positive response, real behavioral indicators are more instructive for marketers and should be applied to the construction of future research framework.