Instagram and YouTube bloggers promote it, why should I buy? How credibility and parasocial interaction influence purchase intentions

By Karina Sokolova, Hajer Kefi. 2020

1,458 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Nowadays social network influencers play an important role in marketing by introducing products to their audience. In this article, we investigate the persuasion cues related to beauty and fashion influencers present on YouTube and Instagram. More precisely, we investigate how the para-social interaction (PSI) the audience creates with the online influencer, along with their perceived credibility, are related to the purchase intention and how they are, in turn, related to the social and physical attractiveness and attitude homophily. We base our research on four beauty influencers popular in France and control our results by the age of the participants and by the influencer. We find that attitude homophily is positively related to PSI but, surprisingly, the physical attractiveness shows negative relationship or no evidence of relationship. Both credibility of the influencers and PSI exhibit significant and positive relationships to purchase intention.

Subfields: Literature and Literary Theory, Marketing, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/be5d3154022eb410c4b0db202062b47b6de6bca2

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Literature and Literary Theory

In Marketing

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

The role of digital influencers in brand recommendation: Examining their impact on engagement, expected value and purchase intention (2019, neutral): “(2018), Lou and Yuan (2018) and Sokolova and Kefi (2019).”
The YouTube Marketing Communication Effect on Cognitive, Affective and Behavioural Attitudes among Generation Z Consumers (2020, background): “Rasmussen [41], Sokolova and Kefi [55], and Hwang et al.”
Measuring social media influencer index- insights from facebook, Twitter and Instagram (2019, methodology): “These studies claim the method to identify the most suitable social media platform to a specific kind of post (Kaushal, Chandok, Jain, Dewan, & Kumaraguru, 2017; Sokolova, & Kefi, 2019; Macarthy, 2018).”
How social media influencers affect behavioural intentions towards recommended brands: the role of emotional attachment and information value (2021, methodology): “Identification moves beyond merely feeling attraction toward influencers; it is an affection-related, emotional process strongly linked to the interaction (Kelman, 1958; Sokolova & Kefi, 2020).”
Seeing destinations through vlogs: implications for leveraging customer engagement behavior to increase travel intention (2020, background): “influencers’ credibility and homophily) (Sokolova and Kefi, 2019; Xiao et al., 2018), without providing a holistic picture of audiences’ video/vlogwatching experience as well as its consequences.”