Changing Brand Attitudes through Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a subtle product endorsement by ordinary individuals who have sizable following on their social networking sites. Leveraging these individuals’ established influences on their social networks, brands attempt to portray favorable images. Eventually, followers’ likeability towards the influencer serves as a vehicle towards building stronger and positive brands. In contrast to its popularity, no systematic way of assessing their effectiveness has been proposed to date. Based on the source-congruence approach and electronic word of mouth literature, we hypothesize that when there is congruence between the influencers’ and followers’ posts, followers will like the influencers’ posts more; as a result, the followers’ attitudes towards the brand will improve. In this emergent research paper, we tested the first hypothesis and propose a method to test the second. Specifically, we downloaded 90,000 images posted by influencers and their followers from Instagram and employed an automatic image classification algorithm. The results support the first hypothesis that the congruence between influencers’ posted images and the followers’ positively influence the linking behaviors of followers.