Purpose
This paper aims to examine how consumers respond to social media influencers that are created through artificial intelligence (AI) and compares effects to traditional (human) influencers.
...Design/methodology/approach
Across two empirical studies, the authors examine the efficacy of AI social media influencers. With Study 1, the authors establish baseline effects for AI influencers and investigate how social-psychological distance impacts consumer perceptions. The authors also investigate the role of an influencer’s agency – being autonomous or externally managed – to test the boundaries of the results and determine the interactive effects between influencer type and influencer agency. Study 2 acts as an extension and validation of Study 1, whereby the authors provide generalisability and overlay the role of need for uniqueness as a moderated mediator.
Findings
The authors show that there are similarities and differences in the ways in which consumers view AI and human influencers. Importantly, the authors find no difference in terms of intention to follow or personalisation. This suggests that consumers are equally open to follow an AI or human influencer, and they perceive the level of personalisation provided by either influencer type as similar. Furthermore, while an AI influencer is generally perceived as having lower source trust, they are more likely to evoke word-of-mouth intentions. In understanding these effects, the authors show that social distance mediates the relationship between influencer type and the outcomes the authors investigate. Results also show that AI influencers can have a greater effect on consumers who have a high need for uniqueness. Finally, the authors find that a lack of influencer agency has a detrimental effect.
Research limitations/implications
The studies investigate consumers’ general response to AI influencers within the context of Instagram, however, future research might examine consumers’ response to posts promoting specific products across a variety of category contexts and within different social media platforms.
Practical implications
The authors find that in some ways, an AI influencer can be as effective as a human influencer. Indeed, the authors suggest that there may be a spill-over effect from consumer experiences with other AI recommendation systems, meaning that consumers are open to AI influencer recommendations. However, the authors find consistent evidence that AI influencers are trusted less than traditional influencers, hence the authors caution brands from rushing to replace human influencers with their AI counterparts.
Originality/value
This paper offers novel insight into the increasingly prominent phenomenon of the AI influencer. Specifically, it takes initial steps towards developing understanding as to how consumers respond to AI influencers and contrast these effects with human influencers.
With social media becoming the primary channel for travelers to acquire travel-related information, tourism service providers are increasingly partnering with social media influencers (SMIs) as part ...of their digital marketing strategy. The present study investigates the effectiveness of SMIs by examining the role that two message factors—argument quality and sponsorship status—have on travelers’ perceptions of a hotel’s commitment to sustainability and their intention to stay at the hotel. Results from four studies show that when eco-friendly hotels sponsor SMIs, an attribute-value message is more effective than a simple recommendation message in influencing travelers’ perceptions and intentions. Given the latest Federal Trade Commission regulations regarding sponsorship disclosure practices, the findings offer valuable insights for tourism providers using SMIs. The study findings suggest that SMIs should create sponsored messages that provide rational and objective information about the hotel’s sustainability practices to stimulate travelers’ related cognitions and persuade them to patronize the hotel.
Given the rise in influencer marketing on social media, this paper explores how homophily between influencers and their audiences affects customer value co-creation behaviour, resulting in increased ...expected brand value and purchase intention. A sample of 910 respondents from the United States completed an online investigation. The results indicate that homophily positively influences customer value co-creation behaviour as well as positively correlates with expected brand value and purchase intention. Customer value co-creation behaviour plays a multi-mediating role. Para-social relationship moderates the relationship between homophily and customer participation behaviour. Overall, this study encourages further research on value co-creation in influencer marketing and can constitute a valuable reference for marketing practitioners and influencers.
•Homophily between influencers and audiences stimulates customer value co-creation behaviour.•Expected brand value and purchase intention occur through customer value co-creation behaviour.•Multiple mediating effects from customer value co-creation behaviour.•Performance of para-social relationship as a moderator.
Over the past few years, the popularity of social media influencers (SMIs) has been growing exponentially, making influencer marketing (IM) prevalent in firm strategies. Despite the mounting interest ...of researchers and practitioners, the resulting scholarly work remains divergent, partial and fragmented. In light of the pivotal role of SMIs on the consumer decision journey and as this research domain is still developing, a comprehensive and critical overview of extant research on this topic is sorely needed. In response, this paper is the first to consolidate the present state of research on IM within social media settings. More specifically, a systematic review of relevant studies published in peer‐reviewed academic journals across diverse fields was conducted in order to identify key themes and dominant concepts. The analysis of 68 articles from 29 Chartered Association of Business Schools‐ranked journals forges a robust understanding of this phenomenon, shedding light on the mechanisms underlying the appeal of SMIs and their influential power in shaping consumer attitudes and behaviour. Based on the analysis, an integrative multidimensional framework is presented that considers antecedents, mediators and moderators of potential outcomes, as well as contextual factors that translate into consumer behaviour. In so doing, various research gaps are identified and avenues for future research are proposed that reflect important emerging areas and unexplored realms with reference to theory, context and methodology. Conclusively, implications of this study for theory and practice are discussed.
The literature on influencer marketing has identified opinion leadership of influencers and parasocial relationship with influencers as two focal constructs affecting followers' purchase intention; ...yet they are only studied in isolation. This research aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the effects of the two key constructs by combining and comparing them in a model with the moderators of post characteristics, namely post type and correspondent inference. Empirical results from 409 online followers of two Instagram accounts confirm the complementary effects of opinion leadership and parasocial relationship in influencer marketing and reveal the more prominent role of parasocial relationship over opinion leadership in affecting followers’ purchase intention. These effects are moderated by post characteristics. Storytelling posts intensify both effects. Correspondent inference enhances the effect of parasocial relationship, but not that of opinion leadership. These findings point to the importance of the social aspect of influencer marketing and inform the influencer marketing research and practice on “who says what” for improving communication effectiveness.
We explore the mechanism through which social media influencers (SMIs) persuade consumers to adopt brands. Guided by the influence framework, we propose and test empirically SMIs’ influence ...mechanism, which occurs in four principal stages: (a) a SMI's influence attempts (showcasing H1: attractive; H2: prestigious; H3 and H4: expert; H5: informative; and H6: interactive Instagram contents); (b) target consumers’ attitudinal response to the influence exercised (evaluating the SMI as a H7: taste and H8: opinion leader); which, in turn, affects (c) the targets’ desire to comply (the desire to mimic); and ultimately (d) their favorable behavioral outcomes (H9: social media word‐of‐mouth and H10: purchase intentions). On the basis of the survey data from 395 respondents, we used structural equation modeling to test our hypotheses and proposed model. We verified the robustness of our results using an ordered probit regression model and analyzed the mediating role of consumers’ desire to mimic SMIs in the influence mechanism. Our results confirm that the five aspects of influencing posts affect consumers’ attitudes positively and significantly, which in turn leads to positive behavioral outcomes through their desire to mimic SMIs. We discuss the results’ important implications for both scholars and practitioners.
Watching online videos is becoming an important part of children's media diets. Children particularly like content that is specifically created for YouTube by YouTube personalities. Because these ...personalities have a large reach and are considered likeable and credible, they have become social media influencers. For advertisers, these influencers are an interesting channel to reach youth. Therefore, influencers often embed persuasive sponsored messages in their videos to earn money. However, there are concerns about this practice because it is not always clear when a video includes advertising. Therefore, in several countries, guidelines have been developed that state that sponsoring in influencer videos should be disclosed as such. Until now, little is known about the effects of disclosures for influencer videos on children and the boundary conditions for such effects. Therefore, we investigated the effects of a disclosure of sponsored influencer videos on children's advertising literacy. Additionally, we examined the consequences of the disclosure for children's responses to the brand, advertised product, and video. We also included the para-social relationship (PSR) that children experience with an influencer as a possible boundary condition for disclosure effects on persuasion. Our experiment amongst children between 8 and 12 years old showed that, when children correctly recalled the disclosure, the disclosure increased their recognition of advertising, and understanding of selling and persuasive intent. Moreover, advertising literacy evoked by the disclosure affected persuasion: The disclosure enhanced brand memory through ad recognition, but also decreased advertised product desire through understanding the selling intent of the video. Furthermore, the PSR of children with the influencer proved to be a boundary condition for disclosure effects on brand attitudes. Only for those children who experienced moderate to low PSRs with the influencer, the disclosure resulted in less positive brand attitudes through understanding selling intent. For children who experienced a strong PSR with the influencer, the understanding that the content had a selling intent did not affect their brand attitudes. These findings show that a disclosure (if noticed and remembered) can be an effective tool to achieve transparency, but also influences the persuasive outcomes of influencer marketing in online videos.
Digital marketing is a new form of marketing that uses several digital media to spread a message. Influencer marketing is a promising acquisition channel for companies to explore. Engaging with ...influencers can help a company improve its brand image and stand out in an increasingly competitive marketplace. However, these opinion leaders can influence the purchasing behavior of the target audience. These are individuals with skills in a particular field, using them to create quality content, they are recognized as experts in their field. The content they publish is often in the form of a personalized story incorporating their opinion on a situation, a product or a service. Success lies in establishing a genuine, preferably long-term, relationship between the brand and its influencers. The objective is to rigorously analyze the links and elements that give meaning to this “Influencer marketing authenticity” interaction. As part of this research, we presented a detailed literature review of authenticity and influence marketing.
Though organizations increasingly collaborate with social media influencers, such as bloggers and videobloggers, little is known as to how the contextual cues related to sponsored content affect the ...authenticity perception of the social media influencers among audience members. This study explores how positive and negative priming of sponsored content shapes the authenticity perception of the vlogger among its audience members. Four different manipulation conditions were constructed to study a U.S. based travel vlog on Qualtrics, with data collected via Amazon's Mechanical Turk. A theory-guided content analysis of 211 open viewer responses was conducted to compare perceptions of authenticity between the manipulation groups. The results verified the significance of priming: the same sponsored content can result in opposite reactions among the audience members depending on the positive/negative valence of the introductory text attached, highlighting the central importance of strategic communication related to the perception of sponsored content. The results also point out the importance of audience member engagement for experienced authenticity: The manipulation of audience participation with the vlog had a stronger effect on the perception of authenticity of the vlogger than the positive/negative valence of the introductory text.
This study examines the moderating role of audience comments in influencer marketing. A YouTube vlog entry by a social media influencer featuring the endorsement of a brand was studied, and an ...experimental design featuring two conditions related to audience comments was created. The results indicate that a parasocial relationship with the influencer builds the perceived credibility of the influencer, while comments by other audience members moderate the effect. Influencer credibility positively affects brand trust and purchase intention. The findings enhance the understanding of the role of an active audience in influencer marketing.
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