Analysis of Influential Fashion Bloggers’ Content Strategies and How it influences the Parasocial Relationship and Social Capital

  • Jiayan Huang

Student thesis: Phd

Abstract

Influencer, as one of the key issues within fashion research, has been valued in the recent year. This study investigates the influential fashion bloggers, how their expression strategies effect on audience’ perception and the relationship between bloggers and the audience. This study seeks to shed some light on the attributes of influential fashion bloggers’ self-disclosure and self-presentation strategies; and how these factors impact on audience involvement process. The self-disclosure and self-presentation are considered as critical concepts to foster and maintain the online persuasion relationships in computer-mediated communication. Building on the existing blogger communication research, this study conceptualises the audience involvement process of influential fashion bloggers. This study investigates the involvement process through narrative transportation theory, parasocial theory and social capital theory, to understand the underpinning mechanism of how fashion bloggers exert the influence over their audiences. A mixed-method approach is conducted, where seven top-ranked fashion bloggers from China were conducted to analysis the parasocial attributes of self-disclosure and self- presentation strategy; and an online questionnaire to measure any relationships between their self-expression and involvement process. Based on the findings of content analysis and quantitative analysis, this study proposes conceptual frameworks to explain the influence mechanism of fashion bloggers.
Date of Award1 Aug 2021
Original languageEnglish
Awarding Institution
  • The University of Manchester
SupervisorDelia Vazquez (Supervisor) & Claudia Henninger (Supervisor)

Keywords

  • parasocial relationship
  • self-presentation
  • social capital
  • social media marketing
  • self-disclosure

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