The evolution of influencer marketing in super connection era: Unpacking the roles of virtual and micro-Influencers

Abstract

Virtual influencers and micro influencers nowadays are increasingly shaping consumer behaviors through social media platforms. This dissertation applies the Cognitive – Affective – Conative framework to investigate how these influencers employ their characteristics as cognition factors represent the psychological, source, and content creation aspects of the influencers, respectively - homophily, credibility, and post’ commercial orientation- engage with followers through para-social relationship and eventually result in some specific behaviors under the framework of decision-making stages. Furthermore, anthropomorphism is incorporated into the study of virtual influencers to examine their visually appealing attribute prior to assessing mechanisms. There are two experimental studies in this dissertation with a dataset of 808. Study 1 picked sixteen profiles of micro influencers who are working in different industries on Facebook and Instagram. The results proved that micro influencers’ credibility was the most strengthen factor positively associated with para-social relationships to information search and buying stages. Even post’ commercial post has a small positive impact on other variables, it contributes as a pioneering study to enhance the positive relationship in micro-influencer activities contrary to hypothesis development (negative effect). Study 2 created four online scenarios of four virtual influencers. The results showed that virtual influencers have significant potential to replace human influencers in marketing initiatives, as most of the relationships are proven. It suggested that consumer are initially drawn to animated virtual influencers due to homophily and tend to place greater trust in human-like virtual influencers. Moreover, higher commitment to para-social relationships fosters increased decision-making stages, especially information search and buying stage. The dissertation provides theoretical and practical implications into the influencer marketing. In theoretical perspective, this dissertation contributes new research in the emerging topic includes the presence of virtual influencers and micro influencers. Moreover, drawing on Cognitive-Affective-Conative framework, this dissertation digs deepen into a fresh theoretical understanding of how influencers influence their followers’ emotions and guide them in making decision through the lens of decision-making stages. This dissertation was implemented in Vietnam -a typical developing country-, so it also offers a thorough look for influencers in developing countries, highlighting how the emerging virtual influencers and micro influencers can shape consumer behaviors. In practical perspective, this dissertation opens the influencer types who can participate in the right marketing initiatives with better saving cost. Moreover, it shapes the role of influencer-follower relationships in continuum behaviors on digital platforms. It will be a fairly reference to those countries similar to Vietnam market.