Digital fitness: the impact of live streaming on trainee engagement and trust.

Abstract

Nowadays, live streaming has become a popular and innovative method on social media platforms for brands to attract more users and showcase their latest products, it offers opportunities for users to interact with each other over the internet in real time (Hu et al, 2017). The fitness industry is becoming increasingly popular and is one of the world’s largest and fastest growing industries in recent years (Lightspeed, 2019). No doubt that covid 19 boosted the growth of digital fitness market, numerous fitness services now integrate live streaming to recreate in-person experiences. Live streaming fitness have some significant advantages for most users, such as convenience, cost-savings, privacy and comfort. Users do not only share workout experiences with friends but also watch others experiences in social media platform, moreover, access live stream videos to follow fitness influencers (FI)’ workouts. a FI is simply someone who uses their SM presence to influence their followers towards fitness. FIs are able to gain popularity by using their platforms to attract to large groups of consumers who are wanting to enhance their health and wellbeing (Duplaga 2020). Studies started inverstigate consumer purchasing behaviours in live streaming, for examples, purchase intentions (sun et al.2020, Cai et al.2018); consumers’ products preferences(Huang and Chuin, 2021);consumers’ trust ( Wongkitrungrueng and Assarut, 2020; Lin et al. 2021),gifting behaviours (Li et al. 2021,Li et al. 2018), but limited research explore the impact of live stream in fitness industry. This research aims to investigate the impact of live stream of fitness services and gain a deeper understanding if fitness influencers lead influence on trainees’ engagement to participate live fitness workouts and if trainees trust fitness influencers’ brand promotions. This research is in the development stage of explore the live streaming phenomenon in fitness industry and how it influences trainees trust and engagement. It will use mixed methods to explore influencing factors to build trainees’ trust and engagement in live streaming fitness services via social media platforms. To implement this, two stages of field research were conducted. The first stage of the field research used an inductive approach, and the second stage of the filed research used a deductive approach. In the first stage, it will select 10 focus group interviews to gain a better and deeper understanding of trainees’ perceptions towards influencing factors on their trust and engagement, thus the findings of focus groups would provide rich data to establish a conceptual model by integrating key factors relate to trainees engage and trust with fitness brands and its influencers through live streaming in social media. The second stage of field research would aim to reach about 500 survey questionnaires to test the proposed conceptual model. The findings of this research will contribute to the literature on live streaming study in fitness industry by examining trainees’ trust and engagement with fitness influencers. It also provides practical implications for fitness industry on how to utilise live steaming services and fitness influencers to engage more with trainees and increase their trust.