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The popularity of live shopping with the Internet and information and communication technology has created a new form of consumption. Consumers can enjoy the convenience, fun, presence, and interactivity brought about by technology empowerment in the shopping process, also giving rise to a group of anchors with goods with a large number of fans. The commercial value of this group should not be underestimated. For example, in 2019, Jeffree Star, the No. 1 male beauty blogger in the oil tube, paid $100 million in taxes in just one month (Sina Finance, 2022). With the increasing expansion of the scale of the group of anchors with goods, the homogenisation of the live process has become a bottleneck in the development of the industry. Dong Yuhui, a former lecturer for China’s largest educational institution New Oriental, transformed into an anchor in 2022, and, by virtue of his knowledge-based approach, he increased 20 million subscribers in a single month, with sales reaching $93 million; the reason for his success was defined as “subverting the traditional live broadcast model” (Sohu, 2022). Live shopping, which has been popular in China for many years, is gradually emerging overseas. In June 2023, Deborah Weinswig, CEO of Coreseight Research, predicted that live streaming sales in the United States were expected to reach $50 billion by the end of 2023. Weinswig also stated that live shopping is expected to account for over 5% of total e-commerce sales in the United States by 2026. At the same time, South Korean Internet giant Naver has acquired Poshmark, and large enterprises such as eBay have also begun to test the live shopping function. More people have recognized the live shopping model.
In this wave of live shopping, as rising stars, knowledge-based live streamers, with their professional accumulation, intellectual charm, golden philosophies, and empathetic expressions, not only significantly improve the sales of products and services, but also spread history, philosophy, physics, chemistry knowledge, and life philosophies in the interaction with fans, allowing consumers to not only buy quality products, but also gain knowledge and emotional touch spiritual enjoyment as a result. The rise of the knowledge-based anchor live-streaming with goods model also involved an increasingly standardized online shopping platform and an increasingly mature user base. The past simple and chaotic model of anchors with goods can no longer be sustained; knowledge-based anchors will become the new representatives and expert idols sought after by the market. Such anchors can not only significantly drive consumers’ willingness to buy and purchase behavior, but also enhance brand recognition and consumer awareness in the sales process, so that live shopping realizes the delivery of products and services and the anchor’s high-quality accompaniment and value guidance to users. Thus, this new live marketing process also has the social value of curbing the vulgarization of marketing by e-commerce anchors and improving the aesthetic quality of netizens.
There is a wealth of research focusing on anchor lead generation, but a dearth of research exploring knowledge-based anchor live lead generation. Therefore, in this paper the authors aimed to build a theoretical model to reveal the factors that constitute the practical logic followed in the process of knowledge-based anchor live-streaming. How do these factors interact with each other and eventually lead the anchor to gain the trust of consumers and trigger their purchase behavior? Therefore, the authors took the live-streaming process of knowledge-based anchors as the research object, obtained primary data through semistructured interviews with knowledge-based anchors, platform operators, consumers, and relevant scholars, combined them with secondary data, and constructed a model with the help of rooting theory to lay the foundation for the subsequent related research.