A Study on the Impact of Linguistic Persuasive Styles on the Sales Volume of Live Streaming Products in Social E-Commerce Environment

• Main Authors: Hanyang Luo, Sijia Cheng, Wanhua Zhou, Sumin Yu, Xudong Lin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-07-01
• Series: Mathematics
• Subjects: social e-commerce; live-stream shopping; grounded theory; linguistic persuasive style; product sales volume; product categories
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7390/9/13/1576

Live-stream shopping is developing rapidly, but the sales levels of live streaming products vary by different hosts. How to increase the sales volume of live streaming products has become a problem. Consumers’ purchase behavior in live streaming is determined by some subjective factors, and the persuasiveness of linguistic style affects this subjective judgment to a certain extent. Therefore, the persuasiveness of the hosts’ linguistic style will lead to changes in consumers’ purchase intentions, which will affect the sales volume of products sold in the live streaming. Based on Hovland’s persuasion model, Aristotle’s rhetoric skills, text analysis, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic extraction model and grounded theory, this study divides the host’s linguistic persuasive style in the social e-commerce environment into five types: appealing to personality, appealing to logic, appealing to emotion, appealing to reward, and appealing to exaggeration. Combined with the sales volume of the product, we establish a regression model, and obtain the influence results of the host’s various linguistic persuasive styles on the sales of live streaming products. The results show that: the linguistic persuasive style of appealing to personality has the greatest positive impact on the sales volume of live broadcast products, but the linguistic style of appealing to logic has a negative impact. Interestingly, the same linguistic style has different effects for different types of products: the linguistic style of appealing to exaggeration has a negative effect on the sales volume of apparel products, but it has a positive influence on the sales volume of digital electrical products. Therefore, different linguistic styles should be used for different product types.