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There are two major strategies for short video advertising which are KOL (key opinion leader) endorsement and in-feed advertising. The authors aim to research the effectiveness of these two strategies for heterogeneous sellers.

The study employed a data set of users from Douyin. Using an endogenous treatment model, the study empirically examines the two strategies' effectiveness in attracting product traffic for online retailors at a short video app Douyin (TikTok).

The results show that the performance of in-feed advertising is higher when the seller's product is of lower price and when the seller has smaller cumulative video exposure. In addition, KOL endorsement is effective regardless of the product price, but performs better when the seller has larger cumulative video exposure.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first to explore the interaction effects of two major advertising strategies, KOL endorsement and in-feed advertising on short video platforms. The findings provide important theoretical contributions and practical implications.

This research paper aims to investigate the critical factors influencing the live commerce industry and their implications for Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) and brands.

The study comprehensively reviews previous research, develops relevant hypotheses and utilizes personal information from 66 anchors, along with data from 23,000 product links obtained from the backends of live commerce platforms.

The study emphasizes that KOLs with higher traffic significantly influence Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV). Intriguingly, KOLs with lower traffic levels exhibit a more pronounced effect on Return on Investment (ROI), highlighting their significance in driving profitability. Furthermore, the study explores the correlation between KOL hashtags and GMV/ROI and the intricate relationship between product types and KOL hashtags.

The findings significantly enhance the understanding of live shopping behavior and provide valuable insights for business management strategies. Practitioners can leverage this empirical evidence to make informed decisions, utilizing extensive data samples of KOLs and brands.

This research contributes unique insights into the live-streaming commerce industry using backend data from Live Streaming E-commerce platforms. The findings are more accurate based on market data than previous studies that relied on platform reviews or questionnaires. Additionally, this paper investigates the impact of KOLs on the performance of live e-commerce from three perspectives: GMV, ROI and hot-selling products.

This study aims to study the attitude toward purchasing luxury fashion of young consumers based on an extended model that integrates the constructs of the theory of reasoned action (TRA), identity theory, social identity theory, affect–behavior–cognition (ABC) model of attitude and brand attractiveness.

A purposive sampling approach was used to collect data from 237 young luxury fashion consumers in Hong Kong. Results were analyzed using partial least square.

The findings revealed that self-identity predicts affect-based attitudes (i.e. passive engagement and active engagement), and social identity predicts cognition-based attitude (i.e. attitude toward celebrity endorsement). Moreover, both affect- and cognition-based attitudes were found to be antecedents that enhanced brand attractiveness, which in turn positively affected purchase intention.

This study collected data from Generation Z. Although this generation is the world’s most influential consumer group and is highly engaged in social media, the findings may not be representative of the entire population in Hong Kong. Therefore, the findings should be used cautiously in the whole luxury fashion industry.

This study extends the understanding of luxury fashion purchase intention from TRA to the connection among identity, social identity theories and ABC model of attitude and brand attractiveness. The findings of this study also contribute to practical insights on developing suitable marketing strategies for the Asian luxury fashion market.

With the development of social media, live-streaming has become an indispensable marketing activity for firms, especially in China. From the initial cooperation with the influencer, firms begin to create their own live-streaming channel, namely, the brands' self-built live-streaming. The purpose of this study is to explore the process of consumer engagement in the brands' self-built live-streaming.

This research comprises two experimental studies. Study 1 examined the effect of streamer types (CEO vs. celebrity) on consumer engagement. Study 2 investigated the moderating effects of product innovativeness.

Results showed that CEO streamers could enhance consumer engagement by increasing consumers' cognitive trust, and celebrity streamers could enhance consumer engagement by increasing consumers' emotional trust. In addition, consumer engagement was higher for really new products (vs. incremental new products) in CEO streamers' (vs. celebrity streamers') live-streaming.

Compared with previous studies that focused on streamers based on the influencer marketing, this study expands the scope of research on the live-streaming ecosystem by exploring the effect of different streamer types on the brands' self-built live-streaming. By investigating consumer engagement, this study gives implications for the sustainable traffic issue in live-streaming e-commerce.

Internet celebrities have become key resources for consumers making purchase decisions. An increasing number of internet celebrities have begun to exert their influence by creating self-branded products. This study aims to examine the antecedents of consumer attitudes and purchase intentions towards internet celebrity self-brands by integrating cognitive consistency theory, cue utilisation theory and the literature on brand authenticity and celebrity involvement.

Two sub-samples of different social media brand communities were collected via online surveys of consumers with experience purchasing targeted internet celebrity self-brands. Partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) was used to analyse the data.

The results of the two sub-samples provide convergent evidence that brand–consumer congruence, brand authenticity and internet celebrity involvement have positive correlations with consumer attitudes towards internet celebrity self-brands, which then positively correlate with purchase intentions in both psychological (Sub-sample 1) and social (Sub-sample 2) brand communities.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first to develop a comprehensive model of consumers’ attitudes towards internet celebrity self-brands, which predict purchase intentions. The model is empirically tested in different social media brand communities, and the convergent results show the power of the proposed model. Internet celebrity involvement is proposed as a key driver of brand attitudes, which has received little attention. We conceptualise internet celebrity involvement and develop a scale to measure it. Based on the findings, we propose strategies to improve the marketing effectiveness of internet celebrity self-brands.

With the prevailing use of online communication platforms, this study revisits the definitions of trust in an online context. By exploring organizational online communications from a practitioners' perspective, a conceptual framework that illustrates the nature of trust and its relationship with dialogic communication between organizations and organizations' stakeholders in the digital era is proposed.

A total of 27 in-depth interviews were conducted with public relations and marketing practitioners involved in coordinating organizational online communications in Hong Kong.

From the practitioners' perspective, stakeholders' online trust toward an organization, which is a hybridity of initial and rapidly evolving trust, begins with stakeholders swift and initial judgment of the organization according to category-based cues (including knowledge-based attributes of the organization, institutional cues, and particular attributes of online dialogic communication) available on online platforms and further develops over time. Practitioners regard the integration of online and offline communication platforms to be the most effective way to build trust in organization–stakeholder relationships in the digital era, while dialectical tensions can hinder trust formed in online communication.

Along with the proposed conceptual framework, this study advances the discussion of online trust in public relations practices from the practitioners' perspective. A qualitative approach provides rich descriptions that may help to enrich theories in public relations and communication management regarding the interplay of trust and dialogic communication in organizational practices in the digital era.

This paper proposes an approach to identify categorical influencers (i.e. influencers is the person who is active in the targeted categories) in social media channels. Categorical influencers are important for media marketing but to automatically detect them remains a challenge.

We deployed the emerging deep learning approaches. Precisely, we used word embedding to encode semantic information of words occurring in the common microtext of social media and used variational autoencoder (VAE) to approximate the topic modeling process, through which the active categories of influencers are automatically detected. We developed a system known as Categorical Influencer Detection (CID) to realize those ideas.

The approach of using VAE to simulate the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) process can effectively handle the task of topic modeling on the vast dataset of microtext on social media channels.

This work has two major contributions. The first one is the detection of topics on microtexts using deep learning approach. The second is the identification of categorical influencers in social media.

This work can help brands to do digital marketing on social media effectively by approaching appropriate influencers. A real case study is given to illustrate it.

In this paper, we discuss an approach to automatically identify the active categories of influencers by performing topic detection from the microtext related to the influencers in social media channels. To do so, we use deep learning to approximate the topic modeling process of the conventional approaches (such as LDA).

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact and effect of renqing in Chinese business relationships. The research focused on a multinational organisation that is based in China.

As the research was exploratory, a qualitative approach was adopted. The researcher was based in the organisation for a six-month period, and interviews were undertaken with purchasing managers.

The findings show that the Chinese concept of renqing comprises favours and opportunities.

The research is exploratory and further research is required to confirm the wider applicability of the findings.

The findings illustrate the importance of understanding the use of both favours and opportunities in business relationship in China. The findings also indicate the importance of being sensitive to cultural factors in business relationships.

This exploratory research indicates that previous conceptualisation of Renqing was limited, as the aspects it encompasses, favours and opportunities, were not identified. This research identifies the importance of opportunities in Chinese business relationships.

Generation Z makes up 20% of China’s population, and accounts for the highest share of household spend at 13% (vs. 3% for the United Kingdom and 4% for the United States). To advance marketers’ understanding about this group of consumers and capitalise on China’s booming market, this chapter uses rich statistics and information to show that China’s Generation Z has distinct behaviour patterns, which can be attributed to the unique background in which they grew up: (1) rigidity of social stratification, (2) abundance of materialism, (3) digital era, (4) limited (vs. extended) family, and (5) heavy schoolwork. Growing up in such a background, Generation Z’s lifestyle and consumption-related attitudes and behaviour are distinct from their predecessors. The chapter presents specific actions that marketers can take when targeting this distinct group of consumers in China, along with useful guidelines to HR managers for hiring them.

Live streaming sales (LSS) is an emerging and flourishing practice in the retail industry. While its implementation has been pervasively attempted, there is a lack of systematic and academic exploration of the practice. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the LSS ecosystem and its development through a literature review and an industry analysis. Moreover, by pinpointing the pitfalls in current practices, this paper presents the practical implications of LSS and provides recommendations and directions for future academic exploration.

The aim of the present study was to investigate the developing trajectory, exclusive elements (such as multi-channel networks (MCNs) and live streamers) and other critical components of the LSS ecosystem using a mixed-methods approach that comprises content analysis of newspaper articles and press releases, literature view and industry analysis.

The results of the analyses indicate the presence of several nonfungible modular components in the LSS ecosystem, including upstream suppliers, MCNs, live streamers and platforms. It was also found that inequalities and hierarchies are inherent to the LSS ecosystem as it currently exists: low-end participants in the LSS industry and small- and medium-sized enterprise owners, who constitute the majority of LSS practitioners, cannot reach the break-even point via LSS hosted by top-level live streamers or others (low-level live streamers, employees, etc.).

This article discusses the LSS ecosystem based on the nature of the nonfungible modules within it. In addition, it discusses the modules (roles) and relationships among them based on the theory of ecosystem developed by previous studies. Furthermore, drawing from an analysis of the pitfalls in the LSS ecosystem, this article highlights strategies for two critical e-commerce processes: 1) choosing which type of LSS to apply based on the factors of brands, products and consumers and 2) integrating LSS to optimize post-sale service and appeal to the sustainability of development.