New Works 04/19

SIEVING THE SOCIAL MEDIA INFLUENCER MARKETING

Distinguishing Between the Brand and the Hustle

 

Social media influencer marketing has gained popularity in recent years. The digital era has created a platform for brands to reach their target markets through social media. “Social media influencer marketing is a strategy brands use to reach out to individual consumers who may not be captivated through other forms of advertising” (Glucksman, 2017; Stubb & Colliander, 2019). These influencers are steadfastly replacing mainstream marketing and celebrity endorsements.

Despite its successes, social media influencing faces authenticity issues and a clear struggle between brand marketing, hustle, and consumer protection. Firstly, “consumers are thronged with tons of information from traditional celebrities and ‘Instagram celebrities’ without clearly authenticating the sources of the information put out to the public” (Jin et al., 2019). Consumers end up being caught up in their buying decision on whether they buy the product or the celebrity.

Authentication issues arise because of the message sent out by the social media brand influencers. While it is up to the consumer to decide whether the brand advertised suit their needs, there is really little regulation on the message that is put out to consumers through social media. Many social media brand influencers have mastered the art of staying socially relevant to their audiences and know exactly what to do or say to pull the numbers (Glucksman, 2017). Due to this reason, consumers are left to play their role of buying while their influencers bag their hustles.

Despite regulatory efforts of protecting consumers through brand-influencer partnerships, consumers really do not care about the partnership disclosures (Phan & Yedic, 2020; Lou & Yuan, 2019)). Consumers focus on the message which entirely does not have any difference with independent influencing. The truthfulness and trust of the content are not affected by the disclosed partnership messages. Still, the consumer remains at risk of being misinformed and lured to buy.

 “Social media brand influencing is done for the benefit of profit-making and clout” (Matthys, 2020). This leaves the question of the authenticity of the marketing and how a consumer sieves what is real and fake in social media influencing. For these reasons, it is important that research is made in the interest of protecting the consumers from untrustworthiness, unauthentic information, and the business of quick profit-making that disregards the consumer’s interests.

The project will unveil practical cases of how consumers have fallen victims to unauthentic social media brand influencing for the reason of finding the solutions of regulating the rapidly growing type of marketing. The research will also find out the regulatory measures that different stakeholders have made to regulate this type of marketing in an effort to measure their effectiveness. By pinpointing the weak lines of social media influencer marketing and the faults in regulating this new form of marketing, the research will be able to recommend the necessary steps to be taken to protect the consumers and how social media brand influencer marketing can positively impact the growth of a company without rushed profit-making messaging tactics that are deployed. Consumers will also be able to differentiate between clout messages and authentic brand messages.

References

Phan, A., & Yedic, S. (2018). “This post is a paid sponsorship” Do we care?: How consumers perceive brands when social media influencers disclose paid partnerships.

Glucksman, M. (2017). The rise of social media influencer marketing on lifestyle branding: A case study of Lucie Fink. Elon Journal of Undergraduate Research in Communications, 8(2), 77-87.

Matthys, M. E. (2020). How authentic is authenticity on Instagram: a Swedish social media influencer and social media follower perspective.

Jin, S. V., Muqaddam, A., & Ryu, E. (2019). Instafamous and social media influencer marketing. Marketing Intelligence & Planning.

Stubb, C., Nyström, A. G., & Colliander, J. (2019). Influencer marketing. Journal of Communication Management.

Lou, C., & Yuan, S. (2019). Influencer marketing: how message value and credibility affect consumer trust of branded content on social media. Journal of Interactive Advertising, 19(1), 58-73.