Influencer Mix Strategies in Livestream Commerce: Impact on Product Sales

A new trend in influencer marketing is livestream commerce, which combines influencers’ live video streaming with e-commerce. Little is known, though, about how firms should develop their influencer strategies to maximize product sales. Given a budget constraint, marketers may choose to employ a single, “big” influencer with a large number of followers or several small influencers. They may also employ a combination of both big and small influencers when their budget is adequate. Analyzing data from 1.3 million livestreams on TikTok, the authors find a negative interaction effect between big and small influencers when employed together due to decreased trust in big influencers and substitution effects. Further analysis reveals that livestream sales generated by a big influencer are adversely affected by small influencers who promoted the same product previously, but not the other way around. In addition, big influencers can reach a much larger audience, whereas small influencers are more effective at increasing the audience's conversion rates. Big and small influencers are also different in terms of how product and campaign characteristics moderate their sales effectiveness. Finally, the scenario analysis explores how the profitability of influencer strategies hinges on the influencer mix and their costs. This research is one of the first to investigate the sales effectiveness of influencer marketing and to provide general guidelines for developing influencer mix strategies.