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Xiaoyan Zhou, Sichuan University, ChinaAbstract
With the acceleration of internationalization among Chinese beauty brands, the Japanese market, characterized by its mature consumer base and unique cultural context, has become a key strategic destination. This study analyzes short-video advertisements targeting the Japanese market on Instagram by three major Chinese beauty brands: Florasis, Flower Knows, and Perfect Diary. Based on visual social semiotics and employing multimodal discourse analysis, the current study examines their cross-cultural communication strategies across four dimensions: visual content, expression, context, and culture. Analyzing 46 advertising videos released in 2024 using quantitative and qualitative methods, this study reveals that the brands adopt differentiated visual positioning, leveraging Eastern aesthetic cultural symbols, scenario transplantation, and celebrity endorsements to enhance advertising effectiveness. Key findings indicate: Florasis’s Eastern ritualistic expression, despite being highly distinctive, needs to balance “cultural export” and “local adaptation”; Flower Knows, albeit appealing to young Japanese consumers with dreamy elements, lacks cultural uniqueness; and Perfect Diary’s celebrity strategy, although efficient, risks homogenization. Furthermore, given Instagram’s algorithm favoring high-engagement content, optimizing multimodal elements (text, music, hashtags) is crucial for improving algorithmic visibility. This study finally recommends that Chinese beauty brands should deepen the visual translation of local cultural symbols, construct a dual “emotional-functional” narrative framework, and dynamically optimize multimodal expressions based on the data.
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Conference: ACCS2025Stream: Visual Culture
This paper is part of the ACCS2025 Conference Proceedings (View)
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To cite this article:
Zhou X. (2025) Visual Culture and Brand Communication: How Chinese Beauty Brands Engage Japanese Consumers ISSN: 2187-4751 – The Asian Conference on Cultural Studies 2025: Official Conference Proceedings (pp. 233-245) https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2187-4751.2025.19
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2187-4751.2025.19
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