Emotional Marketing in The Age of AI: How Businesses Use ‎Empathy to Sell More in A Chinese Context

This study examines how Chinese businesses leverage AI for emotional marketing strategies, demonstrating superior performance compared to traditional methods. Case studies of prominent Chinese tech firms such as Alibaba, Tencent, and Xiaohongshu underscore that ‎culturally adapted emotional marketing yields 20 to 100 percent better outcomes. The research introduces a "Cultural-AI Emotional Marketing Framework" integrating artificial empathy with Chinese values of collectivism, mianzi (face culture), and guanxi (relationship-based ‎commerce). However, ethical concerns arise regarding emotional manipulation, privacy erosion, and dependency behaviors. The findings ‎highlight the effectiveness of emotional AI systems while prompting critical reflection on consumer autonomy and responsible emotional ‎intelligence use in commercial contexts‎.