Gains and Losses of Key Opinion Leaders' Product Promotion in Livestream E-commerce

作者：Niu, Baozhuang; Yu, Xinhu^*; Li, Qiyang; Wang, Yulan

来源：OMEGA-INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT SCIENCE, 2023, 117: 102846.

DOI：10.1016/j.omega.2023.102846

• Livestream operation
• Dual -channel system
• Network externality
• Channel co-opetition

In livestream e-commerce, many brand-owners use the key opinion leaders (KOLs) for product promotion and sales, especially in the direct-selling channel. Is such a practice really beneficial to the brand-owner? In practice, we even observe that KOLs sell and then return products for a strong network externality. Therefore, to formulate the brand-owner's tradeoffs of using KOLs, we compare the brand-owner's prof-its with and without a KOL (i.e., brand-owner uses a KOL for product promotion vs. brand-owner invests in product promotion by itself ) in a dual-channel system comprised of the brand-owner's direct-selling channel and its traditional retail channel. We find the brand-owner's gains/losses of using the KOL highly depend on the commission rate, retain rate and the network externality intensity. Interestingly, we re-veal that the enhanced KOL effect might not be necessarily beneficial to the brand-owner and can even hurt it significantly. As the channel rival, the retailer may benefit from the brand-owner's using the KOL (because its procurement cost may be lowered) and the market expansion (because the use of KOL may spill over to the retail channel).

• 单位
  福州大学