Content marketing in e-commerce platforms in the internet celebrity economy

PurposeWith 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/approachThis 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.FindingsThe 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/valueThis 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.

目的 随着社交媒体以及近期直播的流行，网红代言已成为电商卖家内容营销的一种普遍方法。尽管社交媒体和网络社区得到了广泛应用，但对用户生成内容（UGC）和营销者生成内容（MGC）经济价值的实证研究仍然滞后。本文的目的是在理论和实践上做出贡献，以捕捉电商背景下网红代言对营销结果的一阶效应和二阶效应。 设计/方法/途径 本研究进行了横截面回归以评估网红代言的经济价值，并采用面板向量自回归模型来检验网红和消费者的内容营销行为与电商销售业绩之间的关系。作者还采用前瞻性倾向得分匹配技术来纠正选择偏差。 发现 实证结果表明，营销者的内容生成努力以及营销者与消费者之间的互动行为将显著影响电商销售，这指的是网红代言的一阶效应。此外，粉丝社区内的互动对销售业绩产生内容营销的二阶效应。 创新性/价值 本文为电商零售商评估网红代言的经济价值提供了新的见解，网红代言是电商平台上一种新的内容营销实践。