A Contrastive Study Of Marketing Strategies Applied By Chinese And American Live Streaming Commerce Beauty Bloggers From The Appraisal System Perspective

The increasing popularity of social media sites and e-commerce platforms shapes more diverse online shopping methods.Under such circumstances,live streaming commerce is gradually becoming a popular form by its higher perceived utilitarian and hedonic value.Due to stable target groups and great profitability,the beauty industry is booming and plays an essential part in live streaming commerce.However,it does not receive equal academic attention while achieving great economic value.Although several kinds of research focus on the live streaming platform styles and influencers’ personal characteristics,seldom do studies consider its specific marketing strategies.Therefore,based on Martin’s appraisal system,this thesis attempts to analyze and compare marketing strategies(namely product,price,promotion,and relationship strategy)through the employment of appraisal resources by the Chinese and the American live streaming beauty bloggers.The author selects 10 beauty products to live streaming commerce videos from Chinese and American online shopping platforms respectively.Through transcription tool and manual edition,2 corpora are self-built with the aid of the UAM corpus tool.The main findings are as follows: 1)Both corpora employ lots of appraisal resources and the distributions of appraisal resources of the two parties are similar.Both Chinese and American beauty bloggers use graduation resources most frequently,whose distribution is 45.91% and 47.79% respectively,followed by attitude resources 38.82% versus 38.50% and engagement resources 15.27%versus 13.71%.Within graduation resources,both employ more force resources than focus resources,accounting for 91.10% and 90.38%;Within attitude resources,appreciation resource takes the largest proportion in both corpora,Chinese 72.02% and American 57.14%;Within engagement resources,the distribution of expansion(50.71%)is nearly equal to contraction(49.29%)in Chinese live-streaming rooms while American expansion’s frequency(68.87%)is larger than contraction’s(31.13%).2)Although the distributions of appraisal resources between two corpora are similar,the marketing strategies they employ exist differences.Chinese bloggers tend to use function illustration,appearance description,target groups expansion,coupon issuing,gift-giving,limited-offer incentive,live-streaming room subscription,and sharing;American bloggers are more likely to use whole make-up demonstration,promotion code issuing,live streaming behavior admiration,daily conversation interaction,prompt reply,and personal user experience sharing.3)It is found that the Chinese high power distance culture and the American low power distance culture,the Chinese win-win blogger-merchant deep cooperation model and the American single win blogger-merchant simple cooperation model,the Chinese concentrated and the American relatively scattered live streaming commerce platforms might help to explain the differences in the employment of marketing strategies by two parties.This study not only broadens the research perspectives of live streaming commerce but also helps to provide some insights to merchants and bloggers.