The Relationship between User’s Preference and Social Role in Instant Messaging Application - Taking LINE’s Stickers as an Example

The Internet has become the most popular communication method with the popularity of broadband networks. There are many emotions cannot be expressed only in plain text. Therefore, people began to use emoticons and stickers to express their delicate emotions. According to the survey in January 2018, an instant messenger application that called “LINE”, their active users in Taiwan grew to 19 million people, and their stickers store generated total sales of USD 15.5 million in 2017. For these reasons, the theme of stickers is still worth studying. In recent years, there has been a study of different personality for LINE’s sticker style preferences, it confirms that people with different personality and backgrounds will have significant differences in their preferences. However, many studies only explore the individual’s personality but ignore the main purpose of stickers is for communication, and the style of stickers will also be promoted by the times. In this paper, we propose an overview of previous research on image styles and summarize the style of stickers that recently released on LINE’s store, and we explore the differences between the user’s preferences when communicating with different social relationship. We provide different research perspectives for social science researchers, graphic designers and the cultural and creative industries.