Beauty vloggers and their influence on consumer-buying intentions

This study offers an analysis of the influence of a beauty vlogger’s persona on the buying intent of consumers. Through an experimental survey design Dutch consumers are asked how they perceive the persona of two beauty vloggers, after they are presented with two shortened YouTube clips per vlogger. Then they are asked how likely they are to buy the product recommended or discussed by the beauty vlogger in the videos. The beauty vlogger persona has been conceptualized with the help of theories concerning source credibility, para-social interaction and the Big Five Personality model, and hypotheses were formulated accordingly. The results showed that the dimension of social attractiveness, which is concerned with how kind someone is perceived to be, has the largest influence on consumer buying intentions, and is therefore the most important aspect of a beauty vlogger’s persona in light of this study. The character traits extraversion and conscientiousness closely follow the dimension social attractiveness and are also found to be important influencers. They are mainly concerned with perceived enthusiasm and responsibility of the beauty vlogger. However, where social attractiveness and extraversion influence buying intent positively, conscientiousness leads to a decrease in buying intent. This suggest that the more responsible a beauty vlogger is perceived to be, the less consumers are intended to buy products discussed by this person. As a beauty vlogger that expresses this personality trait will negatively influence any brand, it is important to consider these effects as well. Additionally, the familiarity of the consumer with the product a beauty vlogger discusses prior to watching the video is found to be important across all analyses conducted. Finally, the findings show that even though scientific research organizations point towards 18 to 34 year-olds as the most frequent watchers of online vlogs, a large group of younger and a small group of older people are interested in beauty videos as well. This can again have important implications for brands in creating marketing strategies. The study is mainly limited in its size. However, this study brings innovation to the debate on social influencing by researching a particular type of social influencer that has not been the focus point of any study before, the beauty vlogger, and thereby adds to existing knowledge on the exact workings of interpersonal relations online in this particular context.