Abstract:
Influencer Marketing is relatively a new discipline in marketing that relies on brands to invest in identified influencers to promote branded content for their followers to induce brand awareness, purchase intentions and building long-term relationships. Marketing practitioners are investing a growing share of their advertising budgets on Social Media Influencers (SMIs) to promote their products and services and to increase retention. However, most often than not SMIs are chosen based on numerical indicators and those have been challenged due to their misconduct. Current practices of SMIs challenge the tents of the source-credibility model and limited empirical studies were carried out to signify the impact of SMIs on the consumer-brand relationship (CBR) and conversely on the impact on online purchase intent (OPI). Therefore, this concept paper undertook a deductive approach to critically evaluate the existing literature and propose a new conceptual framework to measure the effectiveness of SMIs. The proposed new conceptual model categorizes SMI attributes into 3 main propositions as source attributes, message attributes and brand attributes. Three variables- brand satisfaction, brand trust and brand personality introduced to gauge the effectiveness of CBR as a mediator between the relationship of SMIs and OPI. The proposed conceptual framework elicits future research opportunities in different industries, products and geographies to be tested empirically.
