Influencer marketing: Social media influencers as human brands attaching to followers and yielding positive marketing results by fulfilling needs
By C. Ki, Leslie M. Cuevas, S. Chong, Heejin Lim. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 2020
613 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract While the literature related to this topic has predominantly focused on investigating the influence mechanism that social media influencers (SMIs) impose over their followers, less is known about their attachment mechanism. Given that social media platforms were originally designed to facilitate personal bonding and not product or brand recommendations, we posited that social media followers' emotional attachment to SMIs is an important precedent that affects the followers' behavioral inclination to accept the SMIs' endorsements. We thus drew new attention to the relationship between SMIs and their followers by focusing on their attachment development mechanism and its casual factors and effects. In doing so, Study 1 inductively analyzed the key causal factors, both with respect to SMI persona- and content-driven attributes, that make followers feel attached to SMIs. By integrating the findings of Study 1 with the human brand theory, Study 2 provided empirical evidence after analyzing 325 U.S. consumers' responses about how SMIs' personas (i.e., inspiration, enjoyability, and similarity) and content curation abilities (i.e., informativeness) affected followers to perceive the SMIs as human brands who fulfill their needs for ideality, relatedness, and competence—all of which resulted in an intense attachment to SMIs. It was this positive emotion shaped with SMIs that transferred to SMIs’ endorsements and positively influenced the followers to acquire the products/brands that the SMIs recommended.
Subfields: Literature and Literary Theory, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0da3763cebfd8fa628b516f6d69f41f4f676d76b
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In Literature and Literary Theory
In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- The effects of social media influencers’ self-disclosure on behavioral intentions: The role of source credibility, parasocial relationships, and brand trust (2021, methodology): “Marketing scholars have recently begun focusing on PSRs, applying them in the context of social media (Baek et al., 2013; Chung & Cho, 2017; Hwang & Zhang, 2018; J. Kim & Song, 2016; Labrecque, 2014; J. Lee & Watkins, 2016; Yuan et al., 2016).”
- Social Media Influencers and Followers: Theorization of a Trans-Parasocial Relation and Explication of Its Implications for Influencer Advertising (2021, background): “Inspirational Internalization One of the major drivers of followers’ attachment to influencers is influencers’ inspirational personae (Ki et al. 2020).”