Research Proposal: Understanding the Impact of TikTok Marketing and Consumer Behavior/Psychology

Executive Summary

The proposal aims to study the use of TikTok as an advertisement tool and its impact on today’s youths as consumers. The proposed study aims to help enhance the understanding of the changing perception of Generation Z towards brands and its links with TikTok’s influence on the consumer perception of various brands. However, due to the subjective nature of the study, this article will employ a qualitative design on how the study participants would perceive and interact with TikTok advertisements. Within the age category of 18-28 years, I have decided to carry out semi-closed, semi-structured online surveys. Thematic coding or thematic analysis will be used during data analysis. A six-phase research design in thematic coding enables different themes and patterns to be detected. The findings of the proposed study may provide marketing strategies that academics, scholars, practitioners, and researchers can use to engage younger consumers.

Understanding Marketing and Consumer Psychology

Research Question: What is the impact of TikTok advertising on the purchase intentions of youths when it comes to cosmetic brands?

Introduction

Background

Marketing consumer behaviour is determined by the response of a targeted audience towards advert promotions (De Mooji, 2019). Both internal and external influences shape consumer psychology. The techniques used for online consumption of the digital environment keep changing, thereby remodelling traditional marketing techniques (Sirisacorn et al., 2023). Newly created and introduced platforms enable people to exchange different types of information, make comments, and interact with companies in a novel manner. Consumers prefer personalized content, adding utilitarian and hedonic values to their interaction with the brand’s content (Macky and Hollebeek, 2019). The TikTok algorithms effectively deliver the videos according to users’ interactions, thus making every feed in the form of preferences. The social media platform’s playful nature and short video format make brands easily attract consumer attention.

Problem Cognition

The consumer purchase decision process begins at the problem cognition phase when the buyer recognizes an insufficiency (Panwar et al., 2019). The decision to purchase a product commences with the urgency of the need, which compels the buyer to buy the good to set his/her want (Putra and Darma, 2021). Induced advertising is a familiar approach marketers use to help consumers identify problems and unmet needs.

Problem Statement

Digital media opens up new avenues, mainly presenting novel opportunities but challenges for cosmetics businesses as customers’ buying intentions and preferences are very much focused on social media use. Cosmetic brands opt to promote their products in TikTok due to their users’ high level of participation (Szewczykowska and Løyche, 2021). Yoong (2023) contends that TikTok is a popular and engaging platform among Generation Z, thus making it a preferred option for brands that want to penetrate the young consumer market.

Gaps in the research

Identifying content variation and product positioning are crucial factors behind TikTok’s prosperity. However, research in user-generated content that prompts consumer engagement with cosmetics has needed to be more extensive. TikTok is now an ideal platform for young people to find accurate content, participate in brand promotion, discover new customer segments, and establish relations with fans. The platform allows users to share and jointly work with each other to distribute their videos. In addition, the previous research remains silent on how the perceptions and attitudes of youngsters may influence cosmetic brands. This research lacuna allows researchers and marketers to exploit the possible options of TikTok, the social networking platform.

Research Methodology

Introduction

Critical literature review involves exploring, assessing, and understanding all the available research about a topic. As such, it summarizes contemporary scholarship, establishes what is lacking in the current literature, and builds the groundwork for future inquiries (Dikert et al., 2016). Contemporary, autonomous scholarly articles on which empirical evidence has been relied from this literature review: the systematic and exhaustive literature search and reasonable evaluation of the studies’ quality and heterogeneity.

Search Process and Strategy

The research questions we formulated helped us develop a search string (table 1), which guided us to generate a starting set of samples and finally attain our objectives. To avoid bias, we got our articles from Google Scholar as opposed to other more popular publisher’s databases such as Wiley Online, Springer, Science Direct – Elsevier, and IEEE. For the period between 2015 and 2023, we will scan the articles and label those that will constitute the initial literature pool as CA1 and CA2. We will also check the significance of these papers and the reference sections of relevant documents to develop an initial set of papers; we shall eliminate articles dated before 2015, ones that do not have references and non-peer-reviewed articles.

Table 1.0 Search criteria start set

Search Strategy

Having defined our research problems and aims, we shall then design a research methodology entailing searching and comparing work related to these problems across different search engines. As advocated by Jalali, Wohlin, and Angelis (2014), the systematic literature review approach shall guide us in creating the search string using the keywords extracted from our research questions. Articles must contain all the searched terms using the Boolean operator “AND/OR.” This method will help us to select some drafts that we can review.

The last step is evaluating whether the papers meet selection criteria (Lefebvre et al., 2019). Subsequently, articles will be identified from their citation and concerning the criterion. The process of backward snowballing entails examining the references cited in the selected papers to identify additional relevant articles. The snowballing procedure entails using backwards and forward passes in communication. Backward-pass will discuss the references list of the papers to search for additional sources (forward pass), and forward-pass will scan through the papers that cite the collection of articles to find other sources (Gusenbauer and Haddaway, 2020). The iterations continue until no more papers are retrieved (Yadav et al., 2020).

Selection criteria

We developed some Inclusion and exclusion criteria to separate pertinent and non-pertinent documents. Table 2 shows the inclusion criteria that we used to select the studies, and they must be related to the research questions. There were articles from practitioners and researchers in the review.

Table 2: The article’s exclusion and inclusion criteria

Study selection and search

After selecting a database per the search strategy, the first set of articles will be extracted using Publish or Perish 6.6 software. The initial stage of papers will undergo backward snowballing, where their citations will be explored. After that, backward snowballing will be done to discover the articles cited in the critiques from the preceding steps, yielding the candidate studies (Wohlin et al., 2022). In this regard, non-relevant articles that include tutorials, journal editorials, discussions, prefaces, comments, and presentations will be used to classify the studies. The pre-selected studies will be screened in the second stage based on publication year, language, and citation number. The initial bundle of selected papers will comprise articles. Articles will be collected for backward and forward snowballing again (stage 4), and then duplicates and non-English articles will be eliminated (articles after screening). In addition, paper titles and abstracts will be used to decide inclusion or exclusion from the study in stage five, while content will be employed to eliminate some more documents.

Quality evaluation

Articles were assessed by both authors using preselected criteria (6th stage). Some questions evaluate the article’s credibility, thoroughness, and applicability; each criterion has a corresponding metric (Hugu and Aeschbach, 2020). Other systematic literature reviews have used the same criteria and metrics. The total score for the four criteria each author rated was computed by averaging the scores assigned to each article to show how well they fulfilled the requirements. Some articles will be chosen, and their quality will be checked from the various reviewed articles.

Data generation and extraction

The extraction and review process will start with backward tracking and verifying the information in extraction form. Using Mendeley software, relevant data will be extracted from each study after referencing them using the extraction form. This form comprises vital information concerning the articles and how they relate to the research questions (Asbari, Nugroho, & Sasono, 2022). The specialist software application Maxqda 18 will copy the research process, including its methods, outcomes, findings, goals, and concluding statement.

Chapter Summary

This chapter has highlighted the various approaches and methodologies of conducting the critical literature review. This chapter has provided an understanding of the literature review’s methodology and approach, selection standards of the articles, and search and selection criteria to ensure only relevant articles were used to achieve the study objectives. The chapter has discussed how the criterion used ensured that the picked papers met the set standards of quality. The last chapter briefly introduces the approach to generating critical data and details the issues under consideration.

REFERENCES

De Mooij, M. 2019. Consumer behaviour and culture: Consequences for global marketing and advertising. Consumer Behavior and Culture, 1-472.

Dikert, K., Paasivaara, M., and Lassenius, C. 2016. Challenges and success factors for large-scale agile transformations: A systematic literature review. Journal of Systems and Software, 119, 87-108.

Gusenbauer, M., and Haddaway, N. R. 2020. Which academic search systems are suitable for systematic reviews or meta‐analyses? Evaluating retrieval qualities of Google Scholar, PubMed, and 26 other resources. Research synthesis methods, 11(2), 181-217.

Hollebeek, L. D., and Macky, K. 2019. Digital content marketing fosters consumer engagement, trust, and value: Framework, fundamental propositions, and implications. Journal of interactive marketing, 45(1), 27-41.

Hug, S. E., and Aeschbach, M. 2020. Criteria for assessing grant applications: A systematic review. Palgrave Communications, 6(1), 1-15.

Jalali, S., Wohlin, C., and Angelis, L. 2014. Investigating the applicability of agility assessment surveys: A case study. Journal of Systems and Software, 98, 172-190.

Lefebvre, C., Glanville, J., Briscoe, S., Littlewood, A., Marshall, C., Metzendorf, M. I., … and Cochrane Information Retrieval Methods Group. 2019. Searching for and selecting studies. Cochrane Handbook for systematic reviews of interventions, 67-107.

Ngangom, M. 2020. How has TikTok impacted Generation Z’s buying behaviour and relationship with brands? (Doctoral dissertation, Dublin Business School).

Panwar, D., Anand, S., Ali, F., and Singal, K. 2019. Consumer decision-making process models and their applications to market strategy. International Management Review, 15(1), 36-44.

Putra, I. K. R., and Darma, G. S. 2021. Process of decisions making purchases online on Instagram social media. International Journal of Business, Economics and Management, 3(1), 165-171.

Sirisacorn, D., Bhumpenpein, N., Yawichai, T., Pornsuppayakul, J., Panyu, K., Puwanatanaboon, R., and Phonwiang, S. 2023. Influential factors shaping the intent to utilize streaming platforms in Bangkok, Thailand. Advance Knowledge for Executives, 2(3), 1-10.

Szewczykowska, K., and Løyche, T. B. 2021. The Power of Customer Engagement on Modern Social Media Platforms. Copenhagen Business School.

Wohlin, C., Kalinowski, M., Felizardo, K. R., and Mendes, E. 2022. Successful combination of database search and snowballing for identification of primary studies in systematic literature studies. Information and Software Technology, 147, 106908.

Yadav, V., Bethard, S., and Surdeanu, M. 2020. Unsupervised alignment-based iterative evidence retrieval for multi-hop question answering. arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.01218.

Yoong, S. C. 2023. The impact of social media marketing on the buying behaviour of millennial and Generation Z consumers.

Appendices

Gannt Chart