Benefit Appeals in Livestreaming E-Commerce: The Moderating Role of Influencers’ Facial Beauty and Body Motion

Benefit appeals represent a commonly used advertising tactic for improving customer response, yet their effectiveness in multimedia livestreaming e-commerce remains unverified. To address this issue, we develop a multi-study framework to investigate the effectiveness of benefit appeals with livestreaming video data and corresponding TikTok sales data. In Study 1, we examine the correlational relationships between benefit appeals and sales with two substudies. Study 1a preliminarily investigates the importance of benefit appeals, their effect on sales, and their interactions with other variables, with both interpretable machine learning methods (XGBoost and SHAP). Study 1b rigorously examines the correlational relationships via econometric methods (OLS regression). The results demonstrate that benefit appeals increase sales significantly. This effect is mediated by increased customer engagement, revealing the underlying mechanism from a behavioral perspective. In addition, the influencer’s facial beauty and body motion intensify the effect of benefit appeals on sales. In Studies 2 and 3, we examine the causal relationships with two randomized online experiments. The results of both experiments corroborate the findings of Study 1 and reveal the mediating role of customer engagement from a psychological perspective. Our study quantifies influencers’ verbal (benefit appeals) and nonverbal cues (facial beauty and body motion) via machine learning and examines their sales effects in both real-world businesses and experimental settings. These findings enrich the literature on benefit appeals in multimedia livestreaming e-commerce.