Live-Streamed Grasslands: How Short Video Scenes Drive Premium Mutton Purchases

Consumers watching a herder in traditional Mongolian attire broadcast live from the Xilingol Grassland are not simply shopping for mutton. According to a new study, they are responding to a carefully constructed digital service scene that reshapes how they value the product and whether they trust it enough to pay more for it than they would at a conventional outlet. The research, published in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, examines how short-video live streaming builds consumers’ willingness to buy specialty agricultural and livestock products at premium prices, using Inner Mongolia mutton as its case study.

The study, led by Pei Jie of Inner Mongolia University of Finance and Economics together with Song Liangyuan and Liu Hehe of Inner Mongolia Agricultural University, draws on servicescape theory, the idea that the designed elements of a service environment shape customer perceptions and behavior. The authors deconstruct the short-video e-commerce scene into three components: live-streamer cues such as speech, appearance, professionalism and charisma; emotional experience reflected in viewers’ sense of presence and immersion; and interactivity, meaning the frequency, timeliness and convenience of exchanges among anchors, platforms and consumers.

To test how these scene elements translate into premium purchasing, the team surveyed online consumers who had viewed short-video live broadcasts on platforms such as Douyin, Weibo and Xiaohongshu. Of 430 questionnaires distributed through an online survey service, 402 valid responses were returned, a validity rate of 93.49 percent. All items were measured on five-point Likert scales. The questionnaire covered seven latent variables: the anchor’s personal charisma, sense of presence, immersion, interactive communication, perceived value, perceived trust, and willingness to buy at a premium. Respondents were asked, for example, whether they found anchors wearing ethnic costumes and jewelry attractive, whether live broadcasts helped them visualize lamb products as if they were there in person, and whether they would still choose anchor-recommended products even if the same quality mutton cost less elsewhere.

The sample skewed toward educated, affluent and married consumers. Women made up 61.70 percent of respondents, 86.8 percent held a bachelor’s degree or above, 78.6 percent were married, and 66.7 percent reported annual household incomes between 100,000 and 300,000 Chinese yuan. Some 75.10 percent lived in China’s economically developed central and eastern regions. The authors acknowledge that this voluntary online survey design introduces self-selection bias and may limit generalizability, a limitation they flag explicitly alongside the product-specific and cross-sectional nature of the data.

Analysis proceeded in two stages. Reliability and validity checks showed all Cronbach’s alpha coefficients exceeding 0.8, with standardized factor loadings above 0.70 except for one perceived-trust item that loaded at 0.691 and was retained because the construct’s internal consistency remained satisfactory. The structural equation model, estimated in AMOS 23.0, then tested the hypothesized pathways. Its fit was mixed rather than strong: the RMSEA of 0.078 suggested acceptable approximate fit, but the incremental indices NFI, RFI, IFI, TLI and CFI all fell below the conventional 0.90 benchmark, and the CMIN/DF of 3.412 slightly exceeded the stricter criterion of 3.0. The authors describe the model fit as marginal and caution that the structural relationships should be interpreted with care.

Within that model, every hypothesized path was statistically supported at the 0.001 level. The anchor’s personal charisma (β = 0.183), interactive communication (β = 0.316), sense of presence (β = 0.202) and immersion (β = 0.321) all significantly increased perceived value. The same scene elements also raised perceived trust, with interactive communication showing the strongest effect (β = 0.438), followed by immersion (β = 0.205), personal charisma (β = 0.183) and presence (β = 0.182). Perceived value in turn exerted the larger influence on premium purchase intention (β = 0.629), compared with perceived trust (β = 0.448). The authors summarize this as two parallel routes from scene to sale: a scene reconstruction–value upgrading pathway and a scene reconstruction–trust establishment pathway.

The theoretical logic behind these pathways draws on three complementary perspectives. Cue consistency theory holds that when product information, source characteristics and contextual signals convey coherent meanings, consumers judge the information as more reliable and feel less uncertainty. In live streams, anchors deliver consistent cross-dimensional cues, combining origin-specific cultural narratives, ecological attributes and expert explanations of production and consumption, which strengthens quality recognition and trust. Psychological distance theory adds that immersion and presence shrink the subjective gap between consumers and geographically distant production environments, allowing more concrete evaluations of value and authenticity. The study also distinguishes the two psychological outcomes: perceived value reflects consumers’ overall assessment of benefits, including ecological, cultural and service dimensions, while perceived trust captures confidence in the authenticity of product information and sellers, and the two operate through complementary but distinct routes.

Because consumer responses may differ across groups, the researchers conducted a multi-group analysis segmented by gender, age, marital status, education, household income and residence area. The patterns were strikingly heterogeneous. Female consumers’ perceived value responded strongly to the anchor’s personal charisma, whereas that factor had limited impact on men, whose perceived value and trust both fed into higher premium willingness; among women, only perceived trust was significant. Younger consumers aged 32 and below relied on sensory experience, with immersion and interaction driving their perceptions, and perceived value was their main driver of premium intent. Older consumers leaned on the anchor’s personal characteristics, and perceived trust carried more weight for them. Married respondents showed significant effects of both perceived value and trust on premium intentions, which the authors attribute to household concerns for children and older adults, while the unmarried group showed no significant effects. Regionally, anchor charisma did not significantly influence perceived value among eastern Chinese consumers, possibly because they are less familiar with Inner Mongolian products and their origins, whereas it was significant in the central–western and northeastern regions.

One subgroup result stands out as a caution. Among respondents without a bachelor’s degree, none of the four live-streaming scene factors showed a significant association with perceived trust, and neither perceived value nor trust predicted premium purchase intention, suggesting the live-streaming scene did not meaningfully move this group’s evaluations. The authors also note that some demographic subgroups were small, reducing statistical power, and they characterize the multi-group findings as exploratory rather than definitive evidence of group differences.

The practical stakes are considerable. The study cites a 2023 short-video live streaming and e-commerce ecology report indicating that Douyin recorded e-commerce sales of 4.733 billion units of specialty agricultural products that year, with 37.78 million hours of live-streamed product promotion and sales growth of 137 percent year on year. Against the backdrop of the classic lemons problem, in which information asymmetry in agricultural markets undermines the ability of genuinely high-quality products to command higher prices, the findings suggest that visually rich, interactive live scenes can communicate ecological, health, cultural and service value that offline channels struggle to convey. The authors recommend promoting live broadcasting in rural and pastoral areas through county-level e-commerce bases, technical training for farmers and herders, and differentiated targeting: emphasizing anchor charisma and healthy-meal scenes for female consumers, supply chain transparency and traceability for male consumers, resource scarcity for eastern audiences, and regional food culture for central, western and northeastern viewers. They also propose third-party certification for married, high-income consumers. As a cross-sectional survey of one product category with marginal model fit, the evidence supports associations rather than proven causal effects, and the authors call for longitudinal or experimental designs, more diverse sampling, and studies of other products and regions before the mechanisms can be considered firmly established.

Subject of Research: How short-video live streaming scene elements shape consumers' premium purchase intentions for specialty agricultural and livestock products, using Inner Mongolia mutton as a case study.

Article Title: Sustainable service scenes: formation mechanism of consumers’ premium purchase of specialty agricultural and livestock products in short-video live streaming

Article References: Jie, P., Liangyuan, S., & Hehe, L. (2026). Sustainable service scenes: formation mechanism of consumers’ premium purchase of specialty agricultural and livestock products in short-video live streaming. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 10, Article 1993041. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2026.1993041

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fsufs.2026.1993041

Keywords: short-video live streaming, premium purchase intention, Inner Mongolia mutton, servicescape theory, perceived value, perceived trust, structural equation modeling, multi-group analysis, information asymmetry, agricultural e-commerce, sustainable consumption, consumer behavior