Marketing

Stefania Casale

From BookTok to Boardrooms

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Stefania Casale is a fourth-year Professional Communication student with a passion for representation and storytelling. Her communication studies provide detailed writing and visual design skills, while her minor in English delves deeper into the structural and cultural elements that capture a reader’s attention. These personal and academic interests thrived while studying International Publishing at Hochschule der Medien Stuttgart. She gained new perspectives on how the global publishing industry works, from editorial processes and content strategy to international markets and cross-cultural collaboration. Learning alongside students from different countries and engaging with industry professionals challenged her to think more broadly and creatively. By combining this background in literature with professional communication training, Stefania hopes to contribute to a publishing landscape that embraces both analytical strategy and the organic power of reader-driven communities.

Consumers are no longer just readers; they are creators, collaborators, and commentators who control the marketing process. BookTok is a sub-community within “the video sharing social network TikTok, where book lovers share recommendations and post reviews of books” (Roberts, 2021, p. 27). The platform offers the creative freedom to discuss literature outside traditional academic boundaries, building a more inclusive and diverse reading community.

This research investigates how social media influencers now control the marketing process as creators and collaborators. A mixed-methods design integrates an extensive literature review with qualitative content analysis and quantitative engagement tracking across five high-performing case study videos. As a result, this approach identifies five core strategies: recommendations, emotional engagement, hashtags, audio, and aesthetics. This study showcases that implementing these five strategies in collaboration with traditional methods, such as in-store displays or book launch events, creates a marketing landscape that utilizes modern techniques and reaches modern audiences.

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