Content marketing in e-commerce platforms in the internet celebrity economy
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/IMDS-05-2019-0270 |
| Pages | 464-485 |
| Date | 06 January 2020 |
| Published date | 06 January 2020 |
| Author | Ruibin Geng,Shichao Wang,Xi Chen,Danyang Song,Jie Yu |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Information systems,Data management systems,Knowledge management,Knowledge sharing,Management science & operations,Supply chain management,Supply chain information systems,Logistics,Quality management/systems |
Content marketing in
e-commerce platforms in the
internet celebrity economy
Ruibin Geng
School of Economics and Management, Xidian University, Xian, China
Shichao Wang, Xi Chen and Danyang Song
Department of Data Science and Engineering Management,
Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, and
Jie Yu
University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China
Abstract
Purpose –With the popularity of social media and, recently, live streaming, internet celebrity endorsements
have become a prevalent approach to content marketing for e-commerce sellers. Despite the widespread use of
social media and online communities, empirical studies investigating the economic value of user-generated
content (UGC) and marketer-generated content (MGC) still lag behind. The purpose of this paper is to
contribute both theoretically and practically to capture both first-order effects and second-order effects of
internet celebrity endorsements on marketing outcomes in an e-commerce context.
Design/methodology/approach –This study conducts a cross-sectional regression to evaluate the
economic value of internet celebrity endorsement, and a panel vector autoregressive model is adopted to
examine the relationship between celebrities’and consumers’content marketing behaviors and e-commerce
sales performance. The authors also adopt look-ahead propensity-score matching technique to correct for
selection bias.
Findings –The empirical results show that the content generation efforts of marketers and the interaction
behaviors between marketers and consumers will significantly influence the e-commerce sales, which refers to
the first-order effects of internet celebrity endorsement. Moreover, interactions within the fan community
exert second-order effects of content marketing on sales performance.
Originality/value –This paper provides new insights for e-commerce retailers to evaluate the economic
values of internet celebrity endorsement, a new content marketing practice in e-commerce platform.
Keywords Content marketing, E-commerce sales, Interaction behaviours, Internet celebrity economy,
Internet celebrity endorsement
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
The cost of people rising to fame has dropped significantly due to the popularity of social
media and live streaming. There are a large number of people who contribute content
through the internet. Only a few of these people can develop a distinctive social image from
the content they contribute. Those who become famous by means of the internet are
described as internet celebrities (Rich, 2009). E-commerce retailers have already realized the
positive impact of celebrity endorsements on purchase intentions; through endorsements,
internet celebrities deliver convincing information about products to consumers and
consequently help e-commerce sellers reap attention and trust from consumers.
Increasingly, internet celebrity acts as an endorser bridging marketers and consumers
Industrial Management & Data
Systems
Vol. 120 No. 3, 2020
pp. 464-485
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0263-5577
DOI 10.1108/IMDS-05-2019-0270
Received 10 May 2019
Revised 9 August 2019
13 November 2019
Accepted 18 November 2019
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/0263-5577.htm
This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos 91546107, 71821002
and 71902152), the Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province (No. LR16G020001) and MOE
(Ministry of Education in China) Project of Humanities and Social Sciences (No. 19YJC630042). The
authors are grateful to the editor and reviewers for their invaluable and insightful comments that have
greatly helped to improve this work.
464
IMDS
120,3
together, and generates informative and persuasive content on social media or other online
communities to actively engage consumers.
In the broadest sense, the value of internet celebrity is generated by social interactions
between indivi dual fans (espe cially “super fans”) and the celebrities they follow as well as
social interactions within the fan community (Liang and Shen, 2016). For example, the selfie
era has createda new billionaire: Kim KardashianWest. She has amassed a gargantuan social
media following 59m Twitter followers and 124m Instagram followers and turned it into an
estimated $350m fortune[1]. The social media queen has parlayedthose loyal fans into a real
fortune by selling them a mobile game, emojis and cosmetics. Celebrity endorsements are
currently increasingly prevalent in online platforms. The academic literature on advertising
providesample evidence of the positive effectsof using celebrities on both advertisements and
brand evaluations(Erdogan, 1999; Hambrick and Mahoney,2011; Hung et al., 2011). However,
internet celebrity and traditional celebrity are two types of opinion leaders involved in
different business models. On the one hand, traditional celebrity builds up idol-centered fans
economy relyingon fanatical emotion of fans. Increasing marginal utility can be observed for
the consumptionbehaviors of fans as proposed in rational addition model.On the other hand,
internet celebrity participates in content-centered intellectual property operation. Audience
will also participate and interact in content contribution, which establishes a reciprocal
information communication platform.
In the social endorsement literature, a widely accepted explanation for endorsement
effects has been that celebrities bring credibility to content marketing, which causes
consumers’attention and trust to the endorsed retailers and hence attracts them to buy more
of the products from the endorsed retailers. We refer to such marketing outcomes as
first-order effects of endorsement. In addition, social interactions among consumers in fan
community might reinforce social presence in online shopping environment, which
enhances consumers’trust toward online sellers and thus increases purchase intention.
However, these second-order associations among the consumers in fan community tend to
be ignored in the literature, though they can be regarded as second-order effects of content
marketing. In previous research, marketer-generated content (MGC) and user-generated
content (UGC) are regarded as two independent communication channels to promote
purchasing (Goh et al., 2013; Trusov et al., 2009; Albuquerque et al., 2012). Prior UGC studies
are largely preoccupied with various aspects of online reviews or word-of-mouth (WOM)
after purchase, such as review volume (Chevalier and Mayzlin, 2006; Duan et al., 2008),
review subjectivity (Goes et al., 2014) and readability (Ghose and Ipeirotis, 2011). As an
exception, John et al. (2017) assessed whether joining a brand’s social networking (SN)
membership changes consumers’purchase behavior in the offline sense by accounting for
both first-order and second-order effects of brand SN membership. Unlike brand SN
marketing, celebrity endorsement marketing relies on consumers’strong attachments to
celebrities (Thomson, 2006) rather than brand loyalty. Whether celebrity endorsements can
improve brand attitudes and increase purchasing via the second-order association with the
fan community is ambiguous.
Documenting and accounting for the social endorsement effect are of practical
importance to e-commerce retailers. Specifically, the endorsement effects may vary for
retailers of different ranks in the market. The literature has discovered that sales
distribution in markets are altered by using information technology. For example, by
examining a database of book sales, Peltier and Moreau (2012) suggest that online
information influences consumers’purchase decisions and leads them to shift from
bestsellers to medium- or low-sellers. Brynjolfsson et al. (2011) find that even online and
traditional channels have the same product availability and prices, and the online channel
shows a less concentrated sales distribution. The less concentrated distribution is not only
due to the increase in product selection but also may be due to internet search and discovery
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Content
marketing in
e-commerce
platforms
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