The impact of influencers in the consumer's purchase intention: The cosmetic industry

Social media is now part of people’s everyday lives. The digital era brought many opportunities, but also many challenges and queries as to what the best way to promote brands and products on social media is. Several businesses are now investing on influencer marketing, even though it is an intensely debated marketing strategy that is still lacking investigation regarding its application. In order to contribute towards this field of research, this study aims to evaluate the impact of social media influencers in the purchase intention of a cosmetic product and further understand which characteristics have a higher influence in the purchase intention. The literature review gives a comprehensive overview of social media marketing. A framework was developed based on the literature review which revealed the social media influencer’s characteristics that might impact the purchase intention of a cosmetic product. In order to test the framework hypothesis, an online survey was conducted which had 338 respondents. The results revealed that homophily and argument quality have a higher impact on the consumer’s purchase intention than popularity, expertise and interactivity. Additionally, it was also evidenced that the social media influencer’s trustworthiness and likability do not have an influence in the consumer’s purchase intention when considering a cosmetic product. Other relevant conclusions were established, suggesting that this them could bring several managerial, academic and marketing implications. With these contributes, managers can make conscious decisions when determining which characteristics to look for when deciding to collaborate with social media influencers.As pessoas passam muito do seu tempo nas redes sociais e a era digital trouxe muitos desafios e questões relativamente a qual a melhor forma de promover marcas e produtos nas redes sociais. Muitas empresas estão agora a investir em marketing de influência, apesar de ainda ser uma estratégia de marketing muito debatida e que ainda não tem muita investigação quanto à melhor forma de aplicação. Com o objetivo de prestar um contributo, este estudo pretende avaliar o impacto dos influenciadores digitais na intenção de compra de um produto de cosmética e investigar quais as características que têm mais impacto na intenção de compra. A revisão de literatura expõe uma visão geral sobre social media marketing. Foi desenvolvido um modelo com base na revisão de literatura, ilustrando as características dos influenciadores digitais que podem ter impacto na intenção de compra de um produto de cosmética. Para testar as hipóteses do modelo, foi desenvolvido um questionário online que obteve 338 respostas. Os resultados revelaram que a homofilia e a qualidade do argumente têm um impacto mais elevado na intenção de compra do consumidor que a popularidade, expertise e a interação. Adicionalmente, também foi possível retirar que a fidedignidade e simpatia do influenciador digital não têm impacto na intenção de compra de um produto de cosmética. Outras conclusões relevantes foram retiradas, sugerindo várias implicações a nível da gestão, investigação e do marketing. Contribuindo para que managers possam melhor selecionar as características que devem analisar quando decidirem colaborar com influenciadores digitais

The Secret of Internet Celebrities: A Qualitative Study of Online Opinion Leaders on Weibo

Internet celebrities are widely observable on social media platforms and are an essential component to a social media marketing program. Drawing on the media success literature and online influencer research, this study reflects Internet celebrities’ fame-seeking practices and discusses on three issues from literature: definition of Internet celebrities, Internet celebrities’ identification criteria and what factors can contribute to individual online influence. A series of interview from three Internet celebrities and three followers of each celebrity were conducted to enrich this study. The results show that Internet celebrities are people who have become famous by means of Internet, and have the ability to influence others. They are characterized as having a certain number of followers; high level of interactivity on their profile; and promising business value. Moreover, this study suggests a five-dimensional perspective to understand individual online influence. We believe that these findings provide new insights for interpretation of Internet celebrities and suggest a possible success formula for fame-seekers to achieve influence on the increasingly competitive social media platforms

The influence of fashion blogger credibility, engagement and homophily on intentions to buy and e-WOM. Results of a binational study

Purpose – The study aims to contribute to the knowledge on the role of the fashion bloggers in the product adoption process in both advanced and emerging markets. Specifically, the study investigates the impact of credibility, engagement and homophily on intentions to buy fashion products recommended by the blogger. Design/methodology/approach – The empirical research builds on an online survey with a sample of 402 consumers (189 Italian and 213 Taiwanese). The proposed model was tested through structural equationmodeling. Findings – Results showed that homophily and the fashion blogger credibility positively influenced the engagement within the blog. Moreover, perceived similarity with the other blog’s followers (homophily) and a higher engagement with the blog both translated in a stronger intention to buy the sponsored products and to spread a positive word-of-mouth about the fashion blogger. Practical implications – The study has practical implications since it identifies strategic suggestions for both companies that create partnerships with famous fashion bloggers and bloggers who have turned their diary-style websites into a business. Originality/value – The study contributes to a better understanding of the influence exerted by blog engagement on intentions to follow blogger’s recommendations. The study also examines credibility and homophily as antecedents of engagement, which have not been extensively researched in the past with respect to blogs

Spillover Effects of Management Companies in the Vtuber Market

학위논문(석사) -- 서울대학교대학원 : 경영대학 경영학과, 2021.8. 윤혜리.Increasing usage of social media has given subsequent birth to micro-celebrities, or social media influencers (SMIs). Despite the fact that SMIs function as key opinion-leaders in society and the market, little is known about what traits make an SMI popular in the first place. While SMIs are generally considered to gain popularity from rock-bottom through individual endeavors alone, we find an exceptional media sector consisting of virtual YouTubers (vtubers). A vtuber, unlike the usual human YouTuber, is an artificially created figure strictly managed by sponsoring companies from the beginning of his/her debut. Finding a similarity between sponsor-vtuber relationships and parent-child relationships within brand extensions, we ran a random effects model against 560 company-owned vtubers to check whether similar spillover effects can be observed in a social media context as well. Our research yielded positive results, suggesting the existence of persistent spillover effects based on parent-brand popularity. An additional time series analysis was conducted against the weekly changes in the size of management agency influence on their affiliated vtubers. An ARIMA(1,2,0) model demonstrates a high fit with our data, and we find that the model confirms a constantly decreasing size of influence along with the passage of time.소셜미디어의 확산은 마이크로셀레브리티와 소셜미디어 인플루언서(SMI)의 등장을 초래했다. 이미 사회적, 경제적으로 SMI들이 오피니언 리더로서 큰 영향력을 행사하고 있음에도 불구하고 이들이 정확히 어떤 근본적 요인으로 인해 대중적 인기를 얻게 되었는지에 대해 알려진 바는 많지 않다. 많은 경우에 SMI들이 순수하게 자력으로만 팬덤을 구축하는 것으로 간주되는 것에 반해, 필자들은 버츄얼 유튜버(vtuber) 업계로부터 예외적인 상황을 목격했다. 일반적인 인간 유튜버와 달리, vtuber는 데뷔 이전부터 소속사로부터 엄격하게 관리당하고 통제 받는 가상의 디지털 캐릭터들이다. 본 연구에서는 소속사 대 vtuber의 관계가 브랜드 확장 상태의 모브랜드 대 신규 브랜드의 관계와 유사하다는 점에 착안하여, 후자의 경우에 관찰되는 스필오버 효과가 전자에서도 발현되는지 검증하기 위해 소속사와 계약을 맺고 있는 총 560 명의 vtuber에 대해 임의효과 모형을 적용시킨다. 그 결과, 소속사의 영향력이 vtuber의 인기에 대해 긍정적 스필오버 효과가 있음이 확인되었다. 또, 주차별 스필오버 효과 크기의 변화에 대한 시계열 분석을 통해 추세를 예측하는 데 적합한 모형으로 ARIMA(1,2,0) 모델을 특정해내어 시간이 지남에 따라 스필오버 효과가 감소하는 경향성을 지님을 검증했다.Chapter 1. Introduction 1 Chapter 2. Literature Review 3 Chapter 3. Research Model and Hypotheses 14 Chapter 4. Data Analysis and Methodology 18 Chapter 5. Results 21 Chapter 6. Discussion and Conclusion 29 Bibliography 32 Abstract in Korean 41 Appendices 42석

InfluencerRank: Discovering Effective Influencers via Graph Convolutional Attentive Recurrent Neural Networks

As influencers play considerable roles in social media marketing, companies increase the budget for influencer marketing. Hiring effective influencers is crucial in social influencer marketing, but it is challenging to find the right influencers among hundreds of millions of social media users. In this paper, we propose InfluencerRank that ranks influencers by their effectiveness based on their posting behaviors and social relations over time. To represent the posting behaviors and social relations, the graph convolutional neural networks are applied to model influencers with heterogeneous networks during different historical periods. By learning the network structure with the embedded node features, InfluencerRank can derive informative representations for influencers at each period. An attentive recurrent neural network finally distinguishes highly effective influencers from other influencers by capturing the knowledge of the dynamics of influencer representations over time. Extensive experiments have been conducted on an Instagram dataset that consists of 18,397 influencers with their 2,952,075 posts published within 12 months. The experimental results demonstrate that InfluencerRank outperforms existing baseline methods. An in-depth analysis further reveals that all of our proposed features and model components are beneficial to discover effective influencers.Comment: ICWSM 202

Social network driven innovation

This paper explains how the increasingly popular social network driven ideation works for some companies, and how this can be expanded to encompass the complete crowdsourcing innovation process (beyond simple ideation). In a contemporary context, businesses that are unable to keep up with innovations are simply overrun by those who are more efficient at this. This results in the dilemma that confronts all innovating companies in the 21st century: while innovation is critical for survival of a company, internal R&D is an inefficient approach to innovation. As a result of this dilemma, today?s innovative companies generally conduct little or no basic research on their own. They mostly innovate using the research discoveries of others. Some of these companies promote ideation forums on social networks to gain ?memes? for innovative ideas. This first step in the crowdsourcing innovation process can be expanded to include all the remaining steps of the innovation process, up to marketing and selling the product or service, as these all originate from ?crowdsourcing ideation?.social network driven innovation, ideation forums, crowdsourcing ideation, crowdsourcing innovation process, memes, mavens, connectors, influencers, nanostories, flash mobs, job to be done

Influencers’ Blogging Patterns and Their Power of Shaping Consumer Purchase Decision: An Analysis from the Consumer’s Perspectives

Objectives: In conducting this thesis, the author primary aims to provide a thorough analysis on typical Influencer’s Blogging patterns that are capable of impacting consumer purchase decision. Secondly, the author intends to shed more light on the identification of the causal relationship between blogger’s recommendation and consumer behavior. Last but not least, author wish to contribute a more holistic information to the research bank about Influencer Marketing, with discussion on both major and minor issues relating to the procedure, conducts and ethical matter of this globally prevalent marketing tactics. Summary: This study benefits International Business research by addressing a global issue of Influencer Marketing strategy application. Related published articles are reviewed and findings were configured using qualitative data collection. In details, two focus group with participants are millennials with exposure to blogs and influencers were conducted. Results was then compared and contrasted to identify commonly perceived blogging patterns practiced by influencers of the field, as well as to pinpoint the scale and weight of consequent recommendations on consumer purchase decision. Discussion chapters follow to explain additional conclusion in accordance with reviewed literature. Main findings are stated along with limitation acknowledgement, international business implication and suggest for future research. Conclusions: Of all patterns mentioned in different research papers, influencers tend to adopt same application standard on content production, blogging frequency, tricks and treats, audience integration and reputation maintenance. Among five patterns, the most impactful one directly affects consumer decisions is content production. Also, the intangible relationship between influencer’s recommendation and purchase decision is solidified. With a proven existence of the correlation, analysis on other minor factors is being put on tray, generating managerial implication for mutual benefits to all of the stakeholder in the industry, namely the brands, the bloggers and the consumers

Ptib: profiling top influential blogger in online social networks

Online Social Networks (OSNs) facilitate to create and spread information easily and rapidly, influencing others to participate and propagandize. This work proposes a novel method of profiling Influential Blogger (IB) based on the activities performed on one’s blog documents who influences various other bloggers in Social Blog Network (SBN). After constructing a social blogging site, a SBN is analyzed with appropriate parameters to get the Influential Blog Power (IBP) of each blogger in the network and demonstrate that profiling IB is adequate and accurate. The proposed Profiling Influential Blogger (PIB) Algorithm survival rate of IB is high and stabl

TRUSTWORTHINESS, EXPERTISE AND LIKEABILITY TOWARDS HALAL PURCHASING BEHAVIOUR: DOES ATTITUDE MATTER?

Background and Purpose: Consumers prefer to review products and services through social media platforms before purchasing them. Consequently, social media influencers have become essential for advertising and reviewing products and services. Credible sources of information using persuasive messages are deemed as influential in the purchasing behaviours of consumers concerning products and services, especially among Gen Z. This paper examines the factors of social media influencers in the purchasing behaviour towards halal food products among Muslim Gen Z in Malaysia. Significantly, the world halal industry is one of the fastest growing markets, especially in the global market, with an estimated value worth around USD 2.3 trillion (excluding Islamic finance) a year.   Methodology: This study used the non-probability sampling method in selecting 226 respondents. Data collected were analysed using SPSS.   Findings: Findings showed that social media influencer trustworthiness, expertise and likeability could affect consumers’ attitudes and behaviours towards halal food products. Attitude plays a vital role as a mediator in the relationship of social media influencers' trustworthiness, expertise, and likeability towards purchasing behaviour towards halal food products among Muslim Gen Z in Malaysia.   Contributions: Accordingly, the findings of this study are expected to contribute to marketing theory and the concepts of consumer behaviours, especially among Gen Z, towards halal food products in the context of Malaysia.   Keywords: Social media influencer, purchasing behaviour, halal food products, Muslim, Gen z.   Cite as: Rizal Putri, V., Rahim, H., Saladin, M., Rasool, A., Zakaria, N. B., & Muhd Irpan, H. (2023). Trustworthiness, expertise and likeability towards halal purchasing behaviour: Does attitude matter? Journal of Nusantara Studies, 8(TI), 26-42. http://dx.doi.org/10.24200/jonus.vol8issTIpp26-4

The Roles of Bloggers in Web 2.0

This study examine the roles of bloggers in Web 2.0. Blogging is considered to be a fairly new phenomenon and blog authors are increasingly seen as producers of user-­generated content wielding influence on both their readers and respective industries. Thus, it is argued that recognizing the different roles assumed by bloggers will shed light on the importance of bloggers and how this may affect marketingpractices