The Empirical Study on New Media Marketing of Three Squirrels' Online Community Platform Based on the 4I Theory

Abstract

In the new media era, consumer attention has become fragmented and traditional firm-centered marketing logic struggles to drive engagement on online community platforms. Grounded in the 4I theory and the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) framework, this study examines how four marketing characteristics of Three Squirrels' online community—entertainment (interesting), benefits, interaction, and personalization (individuality)—influence consumers' purchase intention, and tests whether brand identification mediates these relationships. An online questionnaire was distributed to consumers who follow or have participated in Three Squirrels' Weibo, WeChat, Xiaohongshu, and Douyin communities; 225 responses were collected and 202 valid responses were retained for analysis. Reliability and validity tests, exploratory factor analysis, Pearson correlation analysis, structural equation modeling (SEM), and mediation tests were conducted in SPSS 26.0 and AMOS. The results show that entertainment, benefits, and interaction have significant positive effects on brand identification, while personalization shows no significant direct effect. Brand identification has a strong positive effect on purchase intention (β = 0.914, p < 0.001). The bootstrap mediation test provides statistically robust support for the entertainment path, whereas the benefit, interaction, and personalization indirect paths should be interpreted cautiously because their confidence intervals include zero. The findings refine the 4I theory in the leisure-food online-community context and offer brands evidence-based guidance for designing entertaining content, benefit-oriented strategies, and high-frequency interaction.