An Explorative Study of Consumers' Perception of a Brand's Use of Influencer Marketing

Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation is to conduct an explorative study of consumers' perception of a brand’s use of influencer marketing. As influencer marketing is increasingly exploited on the social media platform Instagram, more and more companies allocate greater resources to this marketing channel. With this, the number of influencers on Instagram and the use of influencers as promotion channels for brands, inevitably increased. Due to this, extensive usage of influencer marketing for brands, can potentially distort the transparency and authenticity of advertisements on social media, for the consumer. In order to investigate this topic further, this thesis has chosen to focus on the brand Daniel Wellington, that is renowned for their use of influencer marketing on Instagram. This is researched through five different types of influencers and their partnerships with the brand. The research aims to answer how the use of influencer marketing affects the source credibility in a partnership with Daniel Wellington, from a consumers’ perspective. The overall theoretical framework for this thesis is based on two main theories; A New Brand Personality Measure (Geuens, Weijters & De Wulf, 2007) and The Source Credibility theory (Hovland, Janis & Kelley, 1953). The research aims to combine the two theories in order to identify a potential correlation. This is done by applying A New Brand Personality Measure model onto influencers; resulting in influencer personality. This can be done as influencers increasingly are perceived as brands. The methodological approach for this thesis builds on preliminary qualitative focus groups followed by a quantitative survey in the primary stage of the research. The two focus groups were conducted in order to gather overall assumptions regarding the topics, and through these, create hypotheses to be tested based on the quantitative research. The results indicate that the individual influencer’s influencer personality, affects the level of source credibility in their partnership with Daniel Wellington. Additionally, results suggest that the fit between influencer personality and brand personality dimensions positively affects the consumers’ perceived level of source credibility. Therefore, this thesis concludes, that in the use of influencer marketing, an aligning fit, between the influencer personality and Daniel Wellington’s brand personality, positively affects the consumers’ perceived level of the partnerships’ source credibility