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1. Introduction
The rapid growth of social media has significantly changed our everyday lives. As it provides consumers with easy and quick access to user-generated product information and allows them to browse product reviews before making a purchase (Lee and Watkins, 2016), social media is gradually substituting traditional media, such as television and magazines, and has become an important platform for marketers to promote brands and products. In particular, the video blog (vlog) has emerged as a popular marketing tool. Video bloggers (vloggers) upload videos about their personal lives and experiences with brands and products to social media platforms (e.g. Facebook, YouTube, Instagram), which increases browsing traffic from followers and other viewers. According to the Social Media Marketing Industry Report 2017, 92 percent of marketers state that social media is essential to their business, 57 percent of marketers use videos and 28 percent use live videos in their social media marketing. Moreover, 75 percent of marketers plan to increase their use of videos and 61 percent plan to increase their use of live videos. Creating videos is the area marketers want to learn about most (Stelzner, 2017).
Despite the importance of the vlog as a marketing tool, our understanding of the marketing results of video blogging (vlogging) is limited. Compared with text-based social media, which allows online personas to maintain a degree of anonymity, the interaction between vloggers and viewers is more like face-to-face interaction. For example, online social features such as views, likes, favorites, and the subscriber feature are more salient in vlogs than text-based blogs (Fu and Sim, 2011; Hill et al., 2017). However, a vlog differs from face-to-face interaction in that social media is the context where vloggers and viewers interact and may therefore influence the quality of the interaction. A few studies have examined the effects of vlogging on consumers. They focused on consumers’ watching and sharing behaviors (Harnish and Bridges, 2016; Yang and Wang, 2015) and their perception of vlogger credibility (Chapple and Cownie, 2017; Hill et al., 2017). Although these outcomes are important, marketers are more interested to know if vlog marketing can ultimately enhance product and brand evaluations. Lee and Watkins (2016) studied the influence of vlogging on luxury brand evaluations (brand luxury, luxury brand value...