A Study On Persuasive Strategies Of Beauty Key Opinion Leaders:Based On Appraisal Theory

With the development of online consumption and the rise of social media,the key opinion leader(henceforth KOL)marketing is booming and has become an incredibly successful strategy for brands to reach a targeted audience on social media over the past few years.The demographic change and the diversification of sales channels enable the usage of beauty KOLs to be a popular tactic in brand marketing.However,as beauty KOL marketing matures,a large number of beauty KOLs emerge,and many of them gradually lose their competitiveness and both KOLs and enterprises in beauty industry face the threat of the loss of customers' trust in sponsored content.Despite the fact that previous studies on beauty KOLs have been conducted from the perspectives of identification and significance for brands,no comprehensive study has been conducted on persuasive strategies.This study aims to investigate the most frequently employed persuasive strategies of beauty KOLs and how these strategies are realized through their discourses,based on employing the Appraisal Theory and the corpora built by using UAM corpus tool.The corpora consist of discourses collected from five social media from 2015 to 2019,involving 20 products of skincare and makeup category,each category with 10 products.The findings are as follows:(1)all three appraisal systems are employed in beauty KOLs' discourse to realize all six persuasive strategies,namely reciprocation,commitment and consistency,social proof,liking,authority,and scarcity.(2)number and quality resources of force category,valuation resources of appreciation category and counter resources of contract category are the most frequently employed resources in beauty KOLs' discourses.(3)Specifically,reciprocation strategy is realized via number and valuation resources;commitment and consistency strategy is realized via number and counter resources;social proof strategy is realized via quality,number,valuation,and counter resources;liking strategy is realized via quality and counter resources;authority strategy is realized via number and valuation resources;and scarcity strategy is realized via quality and number resources.This study is believed to not only broaden the application of Appraisal Theory and persuasion,but also enrich research on persuasive strategies of beauty KOLs and provide reference for research on persuasion of KOLs in other industries.Moreover,this study provides feasible suggestions for persuasiveness enhancement of beauty KOLs and related practitioners.