How virtual influencers’ identities are shaped on Chinese social media: A case study of Ling

Virtual influencers (VIs) have become a powerful marketing tool for brands to promote their products, due to their trouble-free experiences, compared with human influencers. However, uncanny valley, a theory that describes the negative psychological responses triggered by humanoid robots or avatars, suggests that VIs might exert negative responses from social media audiences. Thus, this study aims to investigate how social media audiences perceive Ling, the first computer-generated VI in China. Four research questions were proposed: 1) how Ling builds its persona on Weibo, 2) how consumers perceive Ling’s identity, 3) how social media audiences respond to Ling’s VI marketing strategies, 4) how social media audiences express their intimacy towards Ling. As an exploratory qualitative research method, textual analysis was employed to reveal underlying meaning in social media audiences’ perceptions of VI, and 79 Weibo posts and 8442 comments were collected as the research text. The results showed that users’ response to Ling can be summarized into three dimensions: (1) VI identity as a CGI character, (2) endorser identity as a social media marketing tool, and (3) national identity as a cultural ambassador.