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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