Child influencers on YouTube as the new narrators: Consumer socialization theory revisited

Abstract

YouTube the most popular video-sharing platform has been under investigation for different aspects. Owing to its popularity the platform has also become a marketing and promotional tool. YouTube influencers are one of the core topics discussed and examined from a marketing perspective. However using child influencers is a contentious subject from an ethical sociological and psychological perspective since both the senders and the possible receivers are easily exploitable parties. Preliminary research on the issue is mainly dominated with branding advertising and perception approaches. Nevertheless YouTube is a platform enabling users to tell stories to its viewers. Therefore understanding the content as a narration may also widen the general understanding of the platform. This research aims to explore and analyse child influencers' YouTube videos by conducting quantitative content analysis and narrative analysis. To attain this goal the most viewed 50 videos of the five most popular Turkish child influencers were analysed by considering the video theme and its featured characters. The video themes were coded as 1 for the presence of the category and 0 for the absence of the category. After the coding procedure we used descriptive analysis on SPSS. Then we applied narrative analysis to the verbal communication messages in the videos to understand YouTube as a narration platform. The results are discussed in the realm of consumer socialization theory. © 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.