How opinion leaders persuade consumers : fashion opinion leaders’ narrative strategies for creating eWOM on Chinese social media

Abstract

The success of eWOM marketing depends on opinion leaders interpreting the meanings of marketing messages to consumers through their narrative strategies. Yet, there still remains a lack of understanding of opinion leaders’ narrative strategies in the literature. Given by the facts that China’s luxury market serves as a significant contributory factor to global luxury consumption and Chinese consumers’ luxury purchases are increasingly influenced by eWOM messages shared on social media, this research aims to address this gap to investigate fashion opinion leaders’ narrative strategies to create eWOM messages about luxury brands on Chinese social media. This research carried out a netnography on the naturally occurring social media messages created by China’s Top 10 fashion bloggers. Rhetorical analysis and semiotic analysis were employed to identify bloggers’ narrative strategies. The results show six distinct narrative strategies and highlight the differences between them in transferring the meanings of brands or products and in persuading consumers to accept these meanings. This research is one of the first to explore fashion opinion leaders’ narrative strategies in a non-Western cultural context. This study also contributes to the literature of eWOM by giving a definition on narrative strategy and developing a conceptual framework about the formation of opinion leaders’ narrative strategy for creating eWOM messages. Moreover, the results of this research provide insights for opinion leaders and companies concerning how to effectively create eWOM messages on Chinese social media to engage and persuade consumers. Therefore, this study offers significant findings for academic and practical applications regarding fashion opinion leaders’ narrative strategies.