The impact of beauty vloggers on customers' purchase behavior

Since smartphones and online social platforms have become popular in China, people's lives have changed significantly, and watching short videos has become an important way to enjoy leisure and entertainment. Vloggers provide high-quality videos to the Internet-using public and are supported by a growing audience. These videos with Vloggers' thoughts consciously or unconsciously affect the behavior and thoughts of the public. As a result, referral advertising by vloggers has gradually become an emerging marketing method and has gained more and more attention from brands. The main objective of this paper is to investigate the factors that influence consumers' attitudes toward blog recommendations and to try to understand the extent to which consumers' purchase intentions are influenced by vloggers' attitudes and attitudes toward brands. This descriptive-exploratory study used a single-method quantitative study and a non-stationary convenience sampling technique. Data were collected through an online questionnaire with 243 valid responses. Subsequently, the least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) approach was employed using SmartPLS 3.3.3 software. The results show that the perceived benefits and information quality brought by vlog to the public can significantly influence consumers' attitudes toward vlogger’s recommendations and thus toward brands as well. More importantly, they can effectively induce changes in consumers' purchase intentions, including attitudes toward vlogger’s recommendations and attitudes toward brands.