The Platformized Commercial Persona: CEO Visibility, Fan Labor, and Consumer Engagement in Short-Video Social Commerce

Research on social commerce, influencer marketing, consumer–brand engagement, and CEO social media communication has rapidly expanded. However, less is known regarding how entrepreneurial leaders’ personal short-video accounts operate as platformized interfaces that organize consumer interaction. This study examines how CEO short-video communication produces an observable, collectively sustained commercial persona and connects executive visibility with fan labor, consumer–brand engagement, and consumption imagination. Using the Douyin account of a leading Chinese technology entrepreneur as a case, this study analyzes 372 short videos posted up to 15 August 2024, and 185,561 valid first-level comments. It combines structured content analysis, intercoder reliability testing, BERTopic-assisted topic location, manual thematic validation, and text-based emotional intensity analysis. Work footage, scenes of everyday life, casual presentations, and product props translate entrepreneurial authority into an approachable, platformized commercial persona. In comment sections, users perform informational, relational, affective, memetic, mobilizing, and defensive labor through product requests, familiar address, emotional identification, memes, consumption mobilization, and brand defense. These practices stabilize CEO personas, circulate product meanings, and create consumption imagination, understood as public projections of saving for, ordering, using, or affiliating with products rather than evidence of actual purchases. Emotional identification, consumption mobilization, and brand defense display higher observable emotional intensity than product requests. This study contributes a case-derived conceptual framework demonstrating how CEO identity capital, platform affordances, fan labor, and product-centered imagination are assembled in short-video social commerce.