Emotional, cognitive and conative response to influencer marketing

Current business statistics and extant academic research stress the importance of influencer marketing. In 2019, the YouTube beauty community witnessed the largest product launch in ecommerce history, in which controversial YouTubers, Shane Dawson and Jeffree Star, published a 7-episode series documenting the process of creating a makeup product. The series garnered more than 152 million views, and led to the breakdown of e-retailer websites and resulted in 2 million people waiting in an online queue to purchase products on www.jeffreestarcosmetics.com. In our experiment, we examine the effects of emotions generated by the series on viewers’ attitudes and purchasing behavior. We observe the development of tester perceptions of the two YouTubers and the presented products post three days of media cultivation using the FaceReader software for facial expression recognition, eye-tracking, Emotional Expressivity Scale (EES), and Personality Inventory Scale.