Influencer Endorsements: How Advertising Disclosure and Source Credibility Affect Consumer Purchase Intention on Social Media

By Jason Weismueller, Paul Harrigan, Shasha Wang, Geoffrey N. Soutar. Australasian Marketing Journal, 2020

526 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper investigates the impact of social media influencer endorsements on purchase intention, more specifically, the impact advertising disclosure and source credibility have in this process. The proposed framework argues that advertising disclosure has a significant impact on source credibility subdimensions of attractiveness, trustworthiness and expertise; subdimensions that positively influence consumer purchase intention. Empirical findings based on 306 German Instagram users between 18 and 34 years of age reveal that source attractiveness, source trustworthiness and source expertise significantly increase consumer purchase intention; whilst advertising disclosure indirectly influences consumer purchase intention by influencing source attractiveness. Furthermore, the results reveal that the number of followers positively influences source attractiveness, source trustworthiness as well as purchase intention. All in all, this paper makes a unique contribution to product endorsement literature, with evidence highlighting how social media influencers and advertising disclosure may be used on Instagram to effectively increase consumer purchase intention.

Subfields: Marketing, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/91e7572631ad3045cd05af0cf2145d0ee76bdd06

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Citations in the corpus

Influencer Marketing and Authenticity in Content Creation (2021, background): “In influencer marketing, disclosing that a post or video is a “paid ad” can likewise result in less positive attitudes and lower WTP (Boerman et al., 2017; Evans et al., 2017; Weismueller et al., 2020; Woodroof et al., 2020).”
The impact of the source credibility of Instagram influencers on travel intention: The mediating role of parasocial interaction (2021, background): “In addition, the credible source ensures that the messages about the brands are better understood by the consumers and the travel intent that may arise as a result is easier to predict (Wang and Scheinbaum, 2017; Weismueller et al., 2020).”
The effects of ad heuristic and systematic cues on consumer brand awareness and purchase intention: Investigating the bias effect of heuristic information processing (2021, background): “Through presenting personal experience, influencers can build a para-social interaction relationship with followers (Jin and Ryu, 2020; Weismueller et al., 2020).”