convention and exhibition dissertation proposal
The Sino-British College, USST-University of Huddersfield Extended Abstract
An Investigation into How Chinese Beauty Industry Takes
Advantage of Social Media Influencers to Persuade Purchasing
Decisions of Customers
By Gao Xin (Jane)
Student ID U1875789
Date November 11th 2019
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Executive Summary
With the emergence of a large wave of influencers on social media platforms, the
resulting improvement in marketing techniques has made the Chinese cosmetics
industry undergo dramatic changes. The research aims to explore how social media
influencers [SMIs] specifically persuade consumers' purchasing decisions. Key
research questions will begin with perceptions and attitudes of consumers toward
SMIs. And then, the current means to utilize influencers over the world will be
investigated, followed with possible improvements. An improvement of Scheer and
Stern’s four-stage influence framework will be adopted, in reference of the cognitive
decision-making process. Besides, there will be a primary research towards Chinese
beauty market, laid on 200 students of Sino-British College, USST. All the participants
will be under simple random sampling and the feedback collected will be analyzed by
SPSS software.
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Table of Contents
Executive Summary .......................................................................................................... 2
Rationale for the research topic ......................................................................................... 4
Aims and Objectives ......................................................................................................... 5
Research Questions.......................................................................................................... 5
Principal literature sources ................................................................................................ 6
Proposed methodology ..................................................................................................... 9
Relationship to other final year work & pathway title ......................................................... 11
Reference ....................................................................................................................... 12
Appendix ........................................................................................................................ 15
Appendix A: Participant invitation letter ......................................................................... 15
Appendix B: Structured questionnaire ........................................................................... 16
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Rationale for the research topic
This dissertation was to solve the uncertainties given by the transition of emphasis
from traditional advertising to influencer endorsement in China. It is proved by
Anonymous (2018), who indicated that online influencers have been shaking up the
operations of the entire Chinese industry, giving rise to a new challenge. It is also vital
due to the tendency towards a highly-diverse digital platform, Chinese consumers
were tired of traditional advertising (Liu et al., 2015). As of June of 2019, China has
854 million Internet users, while social media users account for 90% (China Internet
Network Information Center [CNNIC], 2019). The massive growth and usage of social
media, far more than elsewhere, make the research more critical as guidance in a
world-largest E-market (“China marketing”, 2018; Hong, 2017). It also impacts the
survival of beauty companies due to fierce competition. From it, solutions can be
found to help figure out how SMIs play roles in persuading consumption of beauty
products in details (Bognar, Puljic & Kadezabek, 2019).
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Aims and Objectives
To conduct a research, aims and objectives are fundamentally important. This
research aims at exploring the role of SMIs in the Chinese beauty market to help
reach the best marketing approach. When it comes into objectives, it involves 3
aspects in terms of literature review, questionnaires and data analysis. The first
objective is to review the literature related to influencer marketing and digital
marketing because it can form a systematic understanding of influencer marketing
field. The second objective is to design the questionnaire because it will fit most
appropriately with personalized research direction rather than secondary data. Finally,
the third objective is to analyze the obtained data, which is needed to transform
phenomena and facts into rules and opinions, otherwise it will be meaningless.
Research Questions
The relationship between SMIs and purchasing decision in cosmetics industry will be
further researched. Therefore, the dissertation encompasses three questions: RQ1.
What attitudes do consumers hold on social media influencers in Chinese beauty
industry? RQ2. How do social media influencers persuade consumers to make
purchases? RQ3. How can SMIs be improved to make persuasion more effective ?
However, the key to those questions above requires a detailed analysis of data. This
research will firstly collect primary data through questionnaires, followed with a
discrete model analysis to remove extreme values and outliers. After data collation, it
will be analyzed through SPSS to support finding potential patterns and relationship.
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Principal literature sources
This section reviews the literature facilitating the research of how social media
influencers impact consumer decision process in Chinese beauty industry. A wide
range of literature have been reviewed, in terms of newspaper, websites, academic
books and journal articles. There were some topics covered in the literature review.
The first is to explore digital marketing that is due to SMIs have been emerged due to
the development and popularization of digital marketing. Second, online influencer
marketing is covered because it directly provides an overview of background
information to make further research methodical. Third, consumers in cosmetic
industry will be reviewed, followed with influencer impact on their decision making,
that is directly linked with the research questions in terms of consumers’ attitudes and
reactions.
According to Booth & Matic (2011), there is a tendency that influencers are changing
the form of communication with target market in the current business environment.
Based on Nielsen’s research (2012) on trust in advertising, it indicated that 92% of
global consumers prefer to believe influencers who earned their trust, far ahead of
other channels. It suggests that consumers show friendly attitudes towards SMIs that
have already established trust relationships, representing the changing attitudes in
the later stage of decision process, related to the research question. Besides, Sparks
and Browning (2011) found that consumers are susceptible to negative information
and require the positive to be supported by facts, enlightening some possible
improvements of SMIs application.
The major part discussed influencer marketing. “Online beauty” (2019) indicated that
SMIs contribute in persuading purchasing decisions for 80% of beauty consumers ,
showing a vast profitability. However, Yuan (2016) revealed that the fast transition in
China from instant fame to instant commercialization may give rise to crisis. The
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phenomenon is supplemented by Wei (2019) who indicated that there is no direct
relationship between growing traffic and increasing profitability. Another study pointed
out that beauty industry tends to be collaborating with SMIs whose volume and
relevance of extended connections are high (Booth & Matic, 2011). Therefore, the
difference given by literatures makes the research more sustainable because it
provides how to build persuading relationship in quality rather than the quantitative
growth.
Through literature review, a relevant theoretical model has been found. Scheer &
Stern’s (1992) influence framework focuses on the factor variable in a complicated
marketing context when influencers convince how others behave in a certain action
(See Figure 1). It was separated into four stages: the influence intention; the targets’
reaction; the desire to follow, and finally the target’s behavioral outcomes (Scheer &
Stern, 1992; Ki & Kim, 2019). The influence model is related to the research question
of how SMIs persuade customers’ purchase decisions by offering a detailed and
delicate process of how influencers result in the variation of consumers from
psychological to behavior aspect. The model is applied by partially modifying and
combing with consumer decision process model (Solomon, Bamossy, Askegaard, &
Hogg, 2016) to support structured questions of data collection (See Figure 2).
Figure 1 Conceptual model (Ki & Kim, 2019)
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Figure 2 Cognitive decision-making process (Solomon et al., 2016)
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Proposed methodology
Before gathering the data, the researcher is required to take into account essential
ethical standards. Ethics is defined as a philosophical research of morality and an
interpreted examination into whether humans live with moral beliefs and behaviors
(Quinn, 2011). It is essential to minimize the potential risks to participants,
researchers and anyone involved, and safeguard their interests and properties
(Gomes & Duarte, 2018). Otherwise, the confidentiality of information and anonymity
of identity may be challenged (Bell, Bryman, & Harley, 2018). It was also vital to
guarantee the value of experimental procedures (Sochacka, Walther, & Pawley,
2018). Therefore, an ethics consent will be utilized to improve quality as consumers
may be more willing to express their real thoughts without worries.
After ethics consent, the researcher shifted priority to the participant selection and
invitation. The participants were women in the downtown of Shanghai ranging from
18~22 years old, and thus a total of 200 Sino-British college students were invited.
They were contacted via distributing emails to the management department of
campus, similarly used in the literature (Dhanesh & Duthler, 2019). Other research in
‘Impact of influencers in consumer decision process’ has also used a similar volume
of participants and contact methods (Sudha & Sheem, 2017). The research was
simple random sampling, because it can make the calculation of mean and deviation
clearer. Besides, the research only focuses on young women, where the difference
between individuals is small. After appropriate sampling, the researcher prepared for
the invitation process. Participants were informed of aims and objectives and how the
data will be processed (See Appendix A). Once they accepted the invitation, the
researcher will move into the data collection.
A pilot study will be conducted in advance. It was essential to enable an examining
exercise before the full-fledged research, due to a clear direction and the evidence
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base of the research (Maldaon & Hazzi, 2015). Besides, it can help find invalid
practice that can be prevented (Drummond, 2017). It will begin in early December and
end on December 15th 2019 and involve 5 female students for each grade (20 in total)
because they were the main group of cosmetics consumption and social media and
the distribution can also avoid potential specialization.
The instrument for data collection is questionnaire, based on ‘Impact of influencer
marketing on consumer behavior’ (Bognar et al., 2019). It is due to both focused on
the patterns of how the majority were influenced by SMIs, which amplified the
quantifiable characteristics of questionnaires. There will be around 16 questions,
supported by ‘The mechanism by which social media influencers persuade
consumers’ (Ki & Kim, 2019; Bognar et al., 2019). A 5-point Likert scale was adopted
because the effectiveness will decrease if response options exceed beyond boundary
and this research issue is relatively fundamental (Beal & Dawson, 2007). Participants
will be given 5 minutes to finish the survey questions (See Appendix B).
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Relationship to other final year work & pathway title
This research is linked to the Event Management studies by investigating how global
business carried out the leveraging of SMIs in the Web2.0 era, which belongs to a
narrow aspect in Marketing field, Influencer Marketing. Besides, this research has two
potential contributions. One is to explore the Chinese characteristics of applying SMIs,
which is to some extent ignored by research field, the other is to serve as shortcut
guidance for niche brands to compete with the giants. The contributions, if achieved,
are due to the massive work in the remaining academic year.
Word count: 1500
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Appendix
Appendix A: Participant invitation letter
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Appendix B: Structured questionnaire
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