From Brand Loyalty to KOL Dependence: Analysis on User

Conversion Mechanism of Product Marketing on the TikTok

Platform

Yilu Tang

School of Art, Chongqing College of Humanities, Science & Technology, 40154 Chongqing, China

Keywords: Tik Tok, Brand Loyality, User Mechanism Transformation.

Abstract: An increasing number of brands carry out marketing via TikTok. Meanwhile, the process uses Key Opinion

Leader (KOL) as a promotion window. KOL establishes the stickiness between live streaming and fans

through face-to-face interaction with users and then promotes the brand through live streaming, short plays,

and explanations. However, due to the lack of case studies on the success of the in-depth transformation of

users by KOL, brands are still faced with great challenges in brand loyalty transformation. Therefore, this

article will focus on whether the brand can convert KOL fans into loyal customers, especially the audience

that is satisfied with the product. This paper takes "Perfect Diary" as an example to discuss the relationship

between brand loyalty and KOL dependence, establish short-term brand loyalty, emotional trust, and brand

identity, and establish a long-term brand loyalty mechanism to obtain a KOL-driven user transformation and

brand loyalty model, and finally confirm the feasibility of the transformation of user mechanism from KOL

dependence to brand loyalty. A strategic deployment that requires constant adjustment and implementation.

1 INTRODUCTION

With the development of the Internet, the TikTok

platform promotes brands through the head KOL for

topic manufacturing and the waist KOL for quality

content output, effectively enhancing brand attention.

Some KOL will use the fan base to allow users to

participate in the use of the product and real-time

feedback and then combine a large number of bottom

KOC to build word-of-mouth. This behavior

encourages users to enter the fan base for the free trial

of the product, increasing their fan engagement and

thus increasing the influence of KOL. This article will

examine how brands can leverage influence to turn

fans into loyal customers. This study will use

literature analysis to further provide basic

information for the transformation mechanism

analysis. This provides development ideas for the

overall brand marketing direction from brand loyalty

to KOL dependence.

2 KOL AND BRAND

COOPERATION USER

CONVERSION MECHANISM

With the awakening of Chinese cultural

consciousness and the promotion of video media, the

rise of domestic cosmetics has set off a "national hot

tide". In many domestic cosmetics to perfect diary as

an example, since the establishment of the brand in

2017, the use of KOL for brand marketing, starting

from online stores, and then gradually expand offline

stores. As the first brand to create a domestic

cosmetics track, Perfect Diary uses offline experience

to build a private community platform to maintain

users' re-purchase and retention issues. Perfect

Diary's online + offline omni-channel marketing has

a clear division of labor (Su et al., 2023). The

significance of the opening of offline stores is not to

make profits and there is no trend of profit, but the

focus is on increasing contact with users to change the

brand image in the minds of consumers. In the

process of contact, it will join the enterprise WeChat

by entering the store as a gift or scanning the code

into the group to have a surprise and enter the preset

Tang, Y.

From Brand Loyalty to KOL Dependence: Analysis on User Conversion Mechanism of Product Marketing on the TikTok Platform.

DOI: 10.5220/0014074400004942

Paper published under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Applied Psychology and Marketing Management (APMM 2025), pages 85-90

ISBN: 978-989-758-791-7

CRM clue pool that belongs only to the "perfect

diary".

2.1 KOL Influence and Brand Fit

Perfect Diary releases data on the TikTok platform

through the release of a variety of new product

planting notes. For example, TikTok will answer

questions and solve doubts for users who get the

product for the first time through creative makeup

shows and makeup tutorials. Then through the

makeup challenge to attract user attention, as the

exposure increases, the use of star effect to select the

brand positioning, brand story spokesperson, reach all

potential customers, and expand the brand's attention.

It will be promoted periodically by inviting Kols.

Perfect Diary will make good use of current hot things

or "people around" to promote brand reputation (Jia

and Bei, 2021). Taking the eyeshadow plate jointly

launched by the Perfect Diary and the Internet red IP

as an example, this use of its own heat and molding

IP way to increase the flow effect of KOL itself can

encourage consumers to re-buy. Using the knowledge

of IP, it is easier to stimulate consumer interest,

attention, and consumption desire.

2.2 User Conversion Path and

Emotional Marketing

With the development of The Times, people began to

shift from "quantitative needs" and "qualitative

needs" to "emotional needs". The Internet platform

takes this opportunity to carry out emotional

marketing to meet the needs of users. Compared with

the rational and direct marketing means of discount

promotion, emotional marketing lacks the support of

long-term product benefits. The brand positioning

and story of "Perfect Diary" is the stepping stone to

impress users' consumption. Using the emotional

value of goods gives emotional support between users

and brands that cannot be replaced.

Today's Kols interact with users through live

streaming video, providing a range of reference

information such as product presentations and

purchase decisions in the process. Taking the recent

star spokesperson of "Perfect Diary" as an example,

first of all, big data promotion will push the window

to users who have a star effect. On the other hand, the

KOL-concerned users who are interested in related

fields have basic stickiness, so the brand determines

its brand audience when selecting Kols that meet the

brand positioning.

To meet different needs, KOL can enhance

consumers' understanding of products through

communication and interaction such as connection

and bullet screen, thus increasing brand exposure

(Zhou and Fan, 2021). At the same time, ordinary

people will ask questions or share similar

experiences. The interactive behavior of KOL will

reduce consumers' purchase risk or increase users'

empathy ability and sense of identity and increase

consumption desire through emotional impression

factors. The amount of consumer orders is public,

which will stimulate the user's herd mentality. If the

KOL offers limited-time offers or exclusive benefits,

it will prompt consumers to buy in the tight

environment of the time limit and quantity range.

The user's expectations of a product are highly

related to KOL language and the user's actual

experience. The more closely user satisfaction and

KOL are recommended, the higher the user's trust and

stickiness in KOL, and the brand's re-purchase will be

improved (Zhang and Jing, 2024). The repetition of

such steps will enable consumers to have a high

degree of identity with the brand, and then develop

into long-term stable consumption objects.

2.3 Brand Loyalty and Private Traffic

Conversion

Perfect diary through the "head live KOL+ domestic

star style endorsement + open up the international

market star endorsement of a variety of IP contracts"

is relatively long-term stability, the output of the fan

economy to increase continuous exposure, users will

understand the brand from different dimensions,

whether it is the precise positioning of the brand itself

traffic to attract potential and target users. Or through

a large number of relevant Kols in line with their

tonality to carry out the soft promotion of the product

"planting grass" in the way of evaluation. Compared

with the traditional product placement in the past, this

marketing model is more suitable for young consumer

groups (Wang, 2022).

When consumers receive products, they will have

a red envelope card to convert them to a public

number. Not only will they consume online, but

offline stores will also carry out exclusive private

customized consultants or mini program shopping

guides. Enable consumers to receive real-time

updates and interactions through brand campaigns on

other channels. The addition of social private areas

has increased re-purchase rates and user conversion

rates. "Perfect Diary" then through the release of

interactive activities, "daily selfie + new product

release + real person fitting + new product store

experience + life entertainment" way to make users

also become a part of the ordinary KOC, so that users

APMM 2025 - International Conference on Applied Psychology and Marketing Management

feel real and trustworthy evaluation, thus deepening

the sense of trust and identity of the brand. During the

promotion activities, social culture was introduced

into the exclusive shopping mall to achieve sales

transformation (Liu and Wei, 2023). Such a closed

loop of operation will prompt users to switch from

relying on KOL to the brand itself, because

consumers will self-judge the value ratio of products

in the process of use, in the case of excellent products

and brand value, users will choose products with

more brand trust under the same choice, and even rely

on the effect and value brought by the product.

3 ANALYSIS OF THE

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN

BRAND LOYALTY AND KOL

DEPENDENCE

3.1 KOL's Short-Term Boost to Brand

Loyalty

KOL live broadcast is different from the traditional

sales model in the past, its timeliness, interaction, and

affinity promote consumers' purchase decisions, and

through professional explanation, personally try on or

select tutorials to make consumers a more intuitive

understanding of products, identify product quality,

stimulate consumption desire, and improve the

purchase rate. At the same time, KOL uses its own

charm and professional knowledge to attract a large

number of fans' trust and conducts marketing with

him as a window to accumulate highly engaged users

for its sales platform (Wang and Deng, 2017).

However, due to the homogenization of content and

KOL and the high frequency of live broadcasts, users

will have aesthetic fatigue or reverse psychology. In

addition, there is no clear boundary between the

quality and quality of KOL. Once a public opinion

crisis occurs, it will not only directly affect the life

cycle of KOL, but also affect the brand. Compared

with the user stability of the original traditional

offline sales, this is not the only way out for long-term

development.

The traffic peak of each KOL is fixed, and the

brand mechanism he faces is also not fixed. The same

KOL will not only promote and market a brand but

there is a competitive market among similar products.

In the short term, users will enhance brand awareness

through KOL, but they will also face similar

competitive products. Therefore, short-term

promotion through KOL is not lasting and is fungible

in user psychology.

KOL usually attracts consumers to buy products

through simple and crude prices as an important

means of market competition. Generally, KOL uses

the form of short video preheating or the previous

day's live broadcast preheating or brand special to

inform their user groups that their brand mechanism

is unique to the entire platform, and often the "most",

"unique" and "special" labels are very attractive to

users, regardless of whether they will buy will

increase the traffic of the broadcast room. However,

such behavior may exist in the significance of KOL

consumption festivals or the value of their IP, which

frequently adopts this model to overdraft the market

share, which will lead to the continuous decline of the

profit limit of the enterprise, and even not only cannot

achieve the significance of promotion but will

damage the brand hidden assets established in the

early stage of the enterprise.

3.2 The Interaction Between Emotional

Trust and Brand Identity

KOLs use the scene as a language symbol to create a

familiar atmosphere, and the explanation of the

product in the live broadcast is more like a kind of

recommendation and sharing to family and friends.

Indirectly tell users who enter the live broadcast room

or watch videos that the brand wants to convey the

emotional concept and reduce the thinking logic that

users can independently bring into commercial

marketing. The KOL's willingness to introduce the

brand shows that he has a trusting relationship with

the product, and his role should be to share his

experience with users and enhance consumers' sense

of identity with the brand through the output of

content and product positioning.

KOLs use the product name as a hook to get closer

to users. Through the description of the text, the user

is brought into the atmosphere he has set, so that

consumers can be more acceptable, and even leave a

shallow desire to consume. When the user himself

encounters a similar portrayal situation, he will think

about similar emotional needs, and thus convert the

user to pay for the brand.

3.3 A Mechanism for Building

Long-Term Brand Loyalty

The brand transfers users to the brand's private

domain platform through the public domain platform

and KOLs as the medium. In its brand field, there are

no content restrictions and revenue sharing of other

platforms. One-to-one two-way interactive

communication through customer service and

From Brand Loyalty to KOL Dependence: Analysis on User Conversion Mechanism of Product Marketing on the TikTok Platform

assistance can be closer to the user's consumption

psychology and purchase tendency. This kind of

behavior is unattainable by public domain platforms

in terms of cost, user repurchase rate, and long-term

stable user base. In this way, the cost saved by

marketing can be used to update and develop

products, so that the product itself has value, the user's

sense of experience increases, and only a virtuous

circle can promote the long-term survival of a brand.

The virtual character "Maruko", who is a "perfect

diary", plays the role of KOC and shopping guide in

the circle of friends, enhancing the brand trust of

users, and even narrowing the relationship with

consumption, to enhance the brand identity and trust.

However, there will also be problems with the

product itself, which will make consumers have a bad

experience, which will touch the rebellious mentality,

and consumers' trust in the brand will decline, so it is

not too exaggerated and touted when describing the

product.

Of course, not all brands are suitable for private

domain marketing, for example, luxury goods with a

service nature, food with a long update cycle, and

electronic products with weak substitutability are

more suitable for other marketing models. However,

the premise of opening the private domain marketing

model is that the brand has accumulated enough funds

to support the first round of public domain platform

traffic in the early stage. In addition to having a good

brand positioning and products, an emerging brand

also needs to increase brand awareness and promote

sales through KOLs. When users subtly accept the

emergence of new products and good KOC feedback

in the early stage, there will be a tendency to buy. For

example, after a user of Perfect Diary purchases a

product of Perfect Diary, it is possible to add "Xiao

Wanzi" to the card prompt that comes with the

product, completing the transition from the public

domain to the private domain (Tong, 2022).

The new users of "Perfect Diary" also wait for the

brand's offline experience stores to open in various

cities one after another, and only complete the

transformation after participating in the activities of

draining the private domain in the process of offline

experience, which requires long-term capital

operation and public domain platform traffic

maintenance in this process.

Private domain platforms and public domain

platforms need to pay attention to the change in the

way they interact with users, and it is a long-term

process for users not to ask them to add to the

shopping cart immediately to pay. Brands should look

for the frequency range in long-term user observation

and cannot send frequent messages and blindly

recommend products for a long time, which will

implant the psychology of forced consumption to

consumers, thereby consuming users' time and

patience, thereby reducing the user experience and

leading to withdrawal from private domain platforms.

It is more necessary to invade all aspects of the user's

daily life from multiple angles so that the target group

can naturally accept the promotion of the brand.

DISCUSSION

4.1 KOL-Driven User Conversion and

Brand Loyalty Models

By analyzing how "Perfect Diary" realizes the

transformation from a public domain platform to a

private domain platform, it summarizes the model

about how to face user conversion and brand loyalty

after using KOL to drive the brand.

When the brand product has a high-cost

performance and is enough to drive consumers to

make brand purchases, people can refer to Figure 1.

Flow chart for sales conversion.

Figure 1. Sales conversion flow chart (picture credit original).

4.2 KOL Influence and Brand

Exposure Mechanism

The essence of brand exposure is to let more people

know, understand and remember the brand. KOL

itself is a window that already has traffic, and the

interaction between brands and users through the

window is actually to broaden brand awareness. In the

early stage of searching for Kols, general brands need

to pay attention to which are the portraits of target

APMM 2025 - International Conference on Applied Psychology and Marketing Management

customer groups, and which Kols are facing potential

customer groups (Zhao et al., 2020). Because the

influence of different Kols is different, which may be

positive or negative, the brand needs to seriously

consider, because the window of investment should

be fixed and long-term cooperation, and KOL fans are

the audience group of the brand, once the audience

analysis is wrong, all the preparation in the early stage

will fail, and the brand will lead to the user's reverse

psychology. So, choose carefully.

After the implementation of the correct

preliminary process, small interactions on the brand

line can increase the initial attention and sense of

participation of users, deepen the impression of users

on the brand, and make users more acceptable in the

subsequent promotion. Because the KOL promoted

by itself is trusted by users, the brand will also realize

user transformation and deepen trust in the brand and

brand interaction through activities or experiences.

4.3 Emotional Resonance and Brand

Identity Mechanism

KOL itself has resonance with users in content

delivery, from delivering emotional value, finding

emotional identity, to precise labels to improve

communication efficiency and accurate push. In this

process, there is a click-through rate and forwarding

rate, and when the KOL content and the user's

progress and sense of identity are higher, it is easier

to be accepted and spread by users. The services,

stories, experiences and functions delivered by the

brand are all connected with users through KOL as a

medium. Such emotional resonance will greatly

reduce the psychological defense line of users, and

they will not pay too much attention to whether it is

commercial marketing and brand promotion. In

today's era, what users buy is not necessarily rational

and really used products, more is to pay for the story

and concept behind the brand, because users truly

identify with the brand will be willing to pay, and

once such users buy products, the vast majority of

them are highly loyal brand advocates and KOC. This

also reflects that brand stories are more

communicative, influential and attractive than

product prices (Gao, 2021).

4.4 Long-Term Brand Loyalty and

Private Traffic Conversion

Mechanism

After the initial transformation of the brand through

the promotion of KOL, with the relay of the omni-

channel marketing model, the private domain

operation is relatively easy and stable. Through the

private domain traffic pool established by the brand

itself, through the perspective of KOC, by sharing and

delivering some content that is highly resonant with

users in spirit, the brand product promotion can

gradually increase the dependence of users. When the

user stickiness is high enough, a period of long-term

and stable brand loyalty will be established. In

general, as long as the brand is carefully maintained,

it does not consume the user's time, and there is no

serious crisis of public opinion, relatively speaking,

brand users will not waver.

The success of the conversion of private domain

traffic has greatly reduced the cost of the brand in the

public domain traffic, and the product itself is worth

recommending, the user will be a natural KOC, and

once again bring good new users to the brand. In this

process, in addition to interactive activity funds, the

brand will return to the user, as well as the subsequent

related product updates, which will become a virtuous

circle, so that the brand awareness and market will

gradually expand, and the market share will gradually

stabilize. When such a marketing model is successful,

the use will no longer be the "perfect diary" and more

want to try to convert KOL users to brand long-term

loyalty and private domain traffic platform

merchants.

5 CONCLUSION

The reason why the marketing model of "Perfect

Diary" can quickly come out of the circle is that the

brand's selection of KOL is very accurate, and at the

same time, it has found different levels of KOL to

promote, creating a popular trend in the whole

network. Use the fan effect of star endorsements to

create sales records, from e-commerce to offline

stores at the same time as the return of funds. But too

much attention to marketing ignores the quality

problems caused by the product itself, the problem of

user re-purchase rate. From the current results, the

brand is creating sales records at the same time, but

also swallowing revenue profits. "Perfect Diary" is

still in a state of loss, it is obvious that the turnover of

offline stores does not solve the problem of difficult

online growth. As a result, the "perfect diary" is

successful in marketing, and the failure is also in

marketing, and the subsequent products themselves

cannot keep up with the speed of innovation.

Compared with marketing, the brand has less

investment in research and development, and the

number of appearance patents is less than half of that

of similar competitive products. Moreover, the way to

From Brand Loyalty to KOL Dependence: Analysis on User Conversion Mechanism of Product Marketing on the TikTok Platform

promote sales growth in the early stage is that the

brand does not have a good profit tendency in the later

stage, and cannot keep up with the subsequent output,

resulting in reduced user stickiness and long-term

brand loyalty after negative evaluation.

The transition from KOL dependence to brand

loyalty user mechanism can actually be done, but the

process is long and requires reasonable allocation and

operation of funds. User conversion itself is a long-

term process, and too fast a change will trigger

reverse psychology, as well as unstable brand

relationships. If there is no problem in the brand

positioning and the selection of target users, the

function and value provided by the product to users

can gradually increase brand awareness and user

loyalty. However, every step of this process needs to

be stable, not quick success, otherwise there will be a

risk that the brand will not be able to achieve user

conversion and be quickly replaced. At present, there

is no Amway brand in the full sense of long-term and

stable transformation from the birth of the brand to

the private domain platform, so this research still has

certain practical prospects.

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