| dc.description.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. | nb_NO |
