For a company that receives almost half its revenue from customers aged between 25 and 40, Starbucks has been surprisingly successful at marketing on TikTok, a platform aimed at teenagers. The coffee firm’s TikTok account has almost two million followers, more than ten million likes and is packed with clips of customers talking up their drinks and shots of baristas going the extra mile. One video, for example, highlighted customers’ winter styles and celebrated the different ways people dress to beat the cold as they pick up their orders. Other videos showed baristas demonstrating their personal drinks recommendations.
Starbucks isn’t alone in putting effort and marketing dollars into reaching TikTok’s young audience. In 2022, the Chinese company’s advertising revenue leapt 200 percent to pass $11 billion. Brands using the platform range from Chipotle and Duolingo to the NBA and The Washington Post.
But what works for brands and influencers on TikTok? What do brands need to do in order to persuade users to follow their posts and act in response to their content? What specific content styles does TikTok demand that match its short-form video format, please its algorithms, and build engagement with users?
One group of researchers from the Faculty of Economy and Business at Universidad de Zaragoza in Spain wanted to find out. Sergio Barta, Daniel Belanche, Ana Fernández, Marta Flavián recently surveyed followers of one Spanish influencer to understand what makes followers want to keep watching an influencer’s TikToks and what those videos need to contain in order to build influence.
The researchers employed two theories to analyze their findings. The SOR model, or Stimulus Organism Response Model, describes the influence of stimuli on an organism to produce a response. On TikTok, the stimuli are short videos, the organism is the consumer and the response is the behavioral intention, the decision to follow the TikToker or act on their suggestions .
ELM, or the Elaboration Likelihood Model, explains how a TikTok user assesses content, the process of stimulation. The researchers argue that assessment happens in two ways. It either happens through the “central route,” through a cognitive analysis of the usefulness, quality, importance and reliability of the information and its source. Or it happens through a peripheral route, through an emotional reaction to the content in a way that uses quick signals to make snap judgments.
That second approach has long been favored in advertising, the researchers note, which uses humor and affectivity to lead consumers to process information peripherally. “It seems that this form of communication is effective because it is pleasant, and bypasses any requirement to consider sales arguments,” they state.
The researchers assumed that the most effective TikTok accounts might not be those with the most powerful sales messages, but the accounts with the most charismatic influencers and the most appealing content.
Why Are You Following Me?
To find out, the researchers asked 160 TikTok users to describe their feelings about one young Spanish TikTok influencer. The influencer had more than 125,000 followers, of whom two-thirds were women. Twenty percent were under the age of 19, and 54 percent were aged between 18 and 20. The influencer mostly published entertainment videos focusing on fashion, jokes, and flirting, and their videos had racked up more than four million views and a million likes.
The researchers asked the users how much they thought the posts on the account were novel, special and different, innovative and sophisticated. They also asked them to rate the quality of the posts and their frequency. To determine their reactions when seeing the account, the respondents stated whether the influencer allowed them to enjoy a pleasant and relaxing time, and was nice, entertaining, stimulating, and enjoyable.
Questions about the influencer’s opinion leadership examined the degree to which the influencer was a role model, a step ahead of others, showed interesting videos, exerted influenced and provided valuable information.
The researchers also asked the TikTok users to rate their intention to follow the account in the future and the likelihood that they would follow the influencer’s advice and recommendations.
By correlating the results, the researchers were able to identify the reactions provoked by an influencer’s content that were most likely to generate follows and provoke action.
Or to put it another way, they would be able to see whether an emotional reaction to TikTok content describes an SOR model that explains how people react to specific types of videos.
What the researchers found was a mixed bag. Originality had a direct effect on a TikTok user’s intention to both follow an accountant and to act on the advice the account offered. The quality of the videos—their production values and slickness—mattered too but only to a degree. Professional-looking videos were more enjoyable but had little effect on opinion leadership. According to the correlations in the survey, producing polished clips might win views but it won’t necessarily win sales.
Humor was important. It significantly improved the enjoyment the videos generated, and that in turn increased the likelihood that someone would follow the account and be influenced by it.
“Humor was found to be an alternative persuasion route in the TikTok context,” said the researchers. “Specifically, the humor displayed by TikTok influencers creates a more positive hedonic experience that translates into higher influencing capacity.”
One surprising result was the effect of quantity. Matching quantity of posts to attitudes to the content, the researchers found that high volumes of posts reduce follower engagement. Like a flood of advertising, a steady stream of TikTok videos from the same influencer can cause users to feel overwhelmed and overloaded with information. They stop watching.
A TikTok Strategy to Build Followers and Gain Influence
Not all of the hypotheses with which the researchers started their study turned out to be true. The researchers had expected frequent posting to produce both more followers and greater influence. They were also surprised to see that higher quality posts don’t necessarily lead to greater opinion leadership—a sign perhaps that users would prefer to see authentic posts on TikTok than the kind of polished and edited videos they can see on YouTube and Instagram.
Nor did enjoying someone’s TikToks mean that a view was likely to follow the advice in the video.
All of those findings offer some reassurance for people concerned about the possible effect TikTok might have on impressionable young people. Spamming them with slick, professional clips won’t persuade them to buy certain products or vote in a particular way. Making them laugh might help though.
And that suggests an approach brands should start to consider as they prepare their TikTok marketing strategies.
“Humor, a frequent resource in classic advertising, should not be neglected as a persuasive communication tool in modern social media,” recommend the researchers. “The need to combine humor and promotional content in a short video represents a challenge for clever TikTokers, who should clearly employ peripheral affective cues rather than informative reasoned communication arguments in their messages.”
Make a follower on TikTok laugh and you should be able to lead them to buy your product, share your videos and spread your message.
But while professional quality on TikTok isn’t very important, originality is. “Perceived originality is an essential driver of intention to follow TikTok influencers’ accounts and advice,” conclude the researchers. “TikTokers should create original material to attract followers’ attention and awaken their interest.”
So brands looking to build a following and exert influence on TikTok will need to spend time reviewing content and understanding what sort of videos are currently available—if only to avoid repeating them and produce something new. They’ll also need to understand what makes the platform’s young users laugh, a challenge their older creative workers might struggle to achieve.
The easiest option, of course, is to pay an influencer who’s already producing original content that their followers find amusing to work a brand’s messages into their current output.
But brands and influencers who want to create their own followings will have to focus on content that’s original, funny and authentic. And that means being prepared to get things wrong. Starbucks’s TikTok account might be full of funny, original posts showing drink recipes, baristas being fun and authentic, and real customers declaring their love for layer drinks. But an attempt to get one trend to go viral didn’t have the effect Starbucks was looking for.
The #surprisemedrink hashtag was supposed to provide a chance for baristas to show off their creativity. Customers would roll up, ask a barista to surprise them and get a strange combination of fruits, teas and lattes that might not even be on the menu.
For Starbucks, the hashtag should have been a win-win. Customers would create and share authentic content for them, while their staff would demonstrate the range of the company’s products.
And it seemed to work until TikToker Kristen Alk asked for a Surprise Me Drink at one Starbucks drive-thru and was offered… a cup of ice water. The line had been more than half an hour long and the harassed barista was clearly in no mind to try reading the customer’s mind. But the post went viral, racking up more than a million views within days and generating over 7,000 comments.
The brand was talked about and the laughter coming from behind the barista’s window suggested someone found the situation funny. But showing poor service might not have been the successful TikTok marketing that Starbucks was hoping for.
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