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The digital age has witnessed the expansion of marketing channels (Zhu, 2021) and the development of marketing methods. Short video platforms, as a type of newly emerging social media, provide a new marketing channel; and key opinion leaders (i.e. KOLs) in these platforms provide a more novel way of marketing. Currently, the number of users on short video platforms has reached nearly 800 million, occupied 91.2% of netizens who have watched short videos in past six months. The average daily watching time of users increased from 10min-1h to 30min-2h. Short videos get higher value of marketing because of users' highly frequency and long-term short video usage habits (Lu & Fan, 2021). Many users were attracted by emerged short video platforms and their attention were turned into traffic. Because of KOLs' massive fan resources and influence on group communication, KOLs undoubtedly are playing critical role in marketing. According to relevant reports, short videos and KOLs' promotion are the two keys of successful marketing in 2021, which shows that the popularity of short video platforms continues to rise and KOLs marketing is attracting large amount of attention. In short video marketing, KOLs promote products by posting attractive video content in which product details are embedded. The report of Global Web Index (2019) states that social interaction has shifted from "social activities" to "content consumption activities." Thus, many scholars began to pay attention to the research of new and more effective marketing tools in the form of KOLs.
In 1944, Lazarsfeld et al. discovered that trusted figures play more crucial roles in influencing individuals' opinions and preferences- than other factors. These trusted figures in individual's network are called as 'opinion leaders' henceforth. Such opinion-based influence has expanded further relevance thanks to the amplifying power of social media (Scher & Schett, 2020). On microblogging platforms, the term 'key' is often added in front of 'opinion leaders' to highlight the key roles of microbloggers who have millions of followers.
Feng (2020) explored how to transform Internet traffic into economic benefits through KOLs in live streaming. However, in this marketing scenario, it mainly depends on the fan effect of KOLs (Wang, 2019), or on the quality of products or services (Cheng, Wang, & Sun, 2021). The marketing integrates KOLs and posted content is different from marketing in live streaming. Research on this aspect is still at very early stage. Thus, based on the theories in the fields of marketing, communication and psychology, this work explores consumer decision-making behavior and KOL effects on short video marketing environments. In this paper, KOLs are the persons who have high reputation and their suggestions often influence and guide short video platform users’ opinions and behavior. KOLs serve as both the roles of information sharer and salesperson in this study. Through KOL, users can obtain product information in a more relax and entertaining way. This study enriches understanding of KOLs marketing and how KOLs may lead to consumer purchase intention.
Many scholars focus on KOL individual to explore what characteristics would have positive impacts on consumer purchase intention (Lou, 2018; Ren, 2019), but there is a lack of research on how KOLs’ content affect consumer purchase intention. The communicator who has high degree of reliability and content itself are the two factors that will affect the communication effect (Ren, Cao, Li, Liu, Cai & Xing, 2019). Rooted in the persuasion theory of communication studies and the theory of Stimulus-Organism-Response (i.e. S-O-R), we construct the multidimensional integration model of KOLs’ influence on consumer purchase intention by designing various variables which characterize KOLs and their posted content from different aspects and conduct empirical test.