Influencer marketing and purchase intentions : how does influencer marketing affect purchase intentions?

Abstract

Influencer marketing has been experiencing a wave of popularity the last years, and predicted to be the marketing strategy of 2017. Since influencer marketing is a relatively new term, it has no academic definition, and a scarce theoretical foundation exists. Earlier research on influencer marketing has mainly focused on identifying influencers and if they are perceived to be credible. To the best of our knowledge there has been no research investigating the relationship between influencer marketing and purchase intention. Therefore, this master thesis sets out to investigate how influencer marketing affects consumers’ purchase intentions based on the theoretical framework Theory of Reasoned Action. By studying how influencer marketing affects the theoretical framework, we combine the fields of marketing strategy with consumer behaviour. In addition, we have examined how influencer marketing measures up against regular online advertisement. A modified experiment was conducted through the means of an online questionnaire distributed through Facebook. The questionnaire generated responses from 180 respondents, and the results show as expected that influencer marketing positively influences consumers’ “attitude towards the behaviour”, and has no effect on consumer “subjective norm” in the Theory of Reasoned Action framework. However, more surprisingly the results show that influencer marketing has no direct effect on consumers purchase intention, and that influencer marketing is not a more efficient marketing strategy than regular online advertisement. Still, we encourage more research into the field of influencer marketing to further examine this result.