<![CDATA[Amid increasingly fierce competition in the skincare industry, brands are compelled to manage digital marketing communication effectively, particularly through visual-based platforms such as TikTok. This study examines how audience engagement and visual branding quality shape brand attitude toward the TikTok content of @Skintific_id during the April–May 2025 period, grounded in the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), which posits that attitudes can be formed through the central route (active engagement) and the peripheral route (visual cues). Employing an explanatory quantitative design, data were collected through questionnaires from 100 TikTok users who had viewed @Skintific_id content, selected via purposive sampling, and analyzed using multiple linear regression following validity, reliability, and classical assumption testing. Results show that both audience engagement (B = 0.668; t = 9.838; p = 0.000) and visual branding quality (B = 0.169; t = 3.855; p = 0.000) exert positive and significant effects on brand attitude, both partially and simultaneously (F = 95.409; p = 0.000), jointly explaining 66.3% of its variance (R² = 0.663; Adjusted R² = 0.656), with engagement contributing the larger share (Beta = 0.659 versus 0.258). These findings indicate that active, two-way interaction between consumers and brands outweighs consistent visual elements as a driver of brand attitude, while confirming that engagement and visual cues operate simultaneously in attitude formation on short-video platforms.]]>
