M.C.B. Guruge

Assistant Lecturer, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka 

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

ABSTRACT

Influencer marketing is one of the emerging tools in the field of marketing and it is an area that has gained the attention of the researchers. The concept of social influencers has evolved with the rapid popularity of using peer reviews, comments and tweets on products and services when making the purchasing decisions. Subsequently the marketers have identified the vitality of user-generated content and leveraging the power of social influencers in order to promote their brands. However, there is always a grey area about the return on investment of this tool from the client’s perspective. In contrary, the customer also has a doubt on whether the information provided by influencers are credible and unbiased. Most of the previous studies were conducted to investigate the impact of social influencers on purchasing intention, attitudes and public perception on social influencers and different attributes related to social influencers. Thus, limited number of researches have provided constructive models to analyze the attributes related to influencer marketing which affects the purchasing intention. In line with this concept, this paper reveals whether the models that are associated with celebrity endorsement such as source credibility model and attractiveness model can be adapted in order to identify the attributes related to social influencers. Furthermore, some of the new attributes were incorporated to the existing models as well. A deductive method was employed and extensive literature review was carried out as the main research tool in order to highlight the contextual explanations about the concept and finally, the paper presents future research directions in the field of social influencers.  

Keywords: Celebrity Endorsement, Influencer Marketing, Social Media Influencers, Source Attractiveness Model, Source Credibility Model

Download Article: