SESSION 3: INFLUENCER MARKETING
Leung, F. F., Gu, F. F., & Palmatier, R. W. (2022). Online influencer marketing. Journal of the Academy of
Marketing Science, 1-26.
Leung et al. (2022) provide a conceptualization of online influencer marketing. You can use the findings of
this paper to create a backbone for your session, providing some grounding on the definition and use of
influencer marketing. By no means is it required to discuss every detail of this paper. You could focus on:
a. What is online influencer marketing, and what makes it distinct from other marketing strategies?
Online influencer marketing (OIM) is a strategy in which a firm selects and incentivizes online influencers to
engage their followers on social media to leverage these influencers’ unique resources to promote the firm’s
offerings, with the goal of enhancing firm performance.
OIM can be understood as leveraging influencer resources
(including follower networks, personal positioning,
communication content, and follower trust) to enhance a
firm’s marketing communication effectiveness
b. What are the opportunities and threats of influencer
marketing? To which of these opportunities/threats
do the other two papers in this session speak?
Opportunities of OIM
• Targeting Benefits: Companies changing the focus from targeting desired consumer segments to
targeting influencers who can reach those segments.
o First benefit, Influencers build distinct personal brands and draw identity boundaries that attract
homogeneous, like-minded people who share similar characteristics and are more likely to buy the
products.
o Leveraging influencer´s networks allow firms to capture consumers´ changing preferences and
constantly attracting new followers, and therefore potential new customers.
• Positioning Benefits: Firms have a clear goal and position and value proposition for their products or
services – OIM can complement these firm lead-positionings. Followers search for people that share
similar positions, mind-sets, values, which can be used to leverage firm performance.
o First benefit, influencers positioning tends to evoke high market acceptance, satisfaction among target
consumers. Well positioned brands and influencers are likely to recreate or reinforce consumers brand
associations.
o Second benefit, influencers manage their content to reflect their positioning. The distinctiveness, or
uniqueness of influencers enables firms to distinct their brand with specific attributes to achieve
favorable positioning.
• Creativity Benefits: Influencers create unique, novel and creative content which firms can use to gain
access to their tacit knowledge what and how to talk about.
• Trust Benefits: Consumers are increasingly skeptical about traditional marketing tactics. The trust that
influencers earn from followers constitutes a valuable resource that firms can capitalize on. Followers
have more trust in their influencers because they appear more authentic because they promote
products by their intrinsic motivation, rather than marketing goals.
, Threats of OIM
• Content Control Threat: Outsourcing marketing actions to Influencers creates content control problems,
as multiple independent influencers differ in their content quality and messaging
• Customer Retention Threat: Maintaining customers trust and loyalty to the firm depends on influencers
and their trustworthiness and their loyalty to the brand. These capabilities lie beyond of one single
OIM campaign. It’s easy to spread information and exposure through influencers but afterwards the
brand needs to find ways to retain customers.
c. How can firms successfully manage online influencer marketing?
Firms need to manage influencers in a way that aligns with the companies’ goals:
1. Select the right people that fit the firms marketing needs
2. Monitor the influencers content creation process
3. Make the performance measurable and compare the results continuously to company goals
a. Engagement (likes, comments, shares, mentions, reposts)
b. Website traffic (tunnel measurement)
4. Make the content reusable for firms lead marketing communications
a. Re-use content that has been well engaged with on brand owned channels
b. Re-using content adds authenticity and social proof the band communication efforts
Hughes, C., Swaminathan, V., & Brooks, G. (2019). Driving brand engagement through online social
influencers- An empirical investigation of sponsored blogging campaigns. Journal of Marketing, 83(5),
78-96.
RQ: What drives sponsored blogging strategies?
Examining blogger characteristics, content characteristics and campaign incentives.
a. What are the important variables in this study (see Figure 1), and how are they hypothesized to
relate to each other?
Sponsored Blogging: Companies solicit influencers to post about specific products/services/brands.
Moderators:
• Social media platforms (blogs vs. Facebook) which vary in their level of distraction and engagement
• Stage of Consumer Decision Journey (CDJ) (awareness vs. trial), which imply higher levels of
motivation closer to trial.
Dependent Variable:
• Engagement (Blog platform engagement vs. Facebook platform engagement), indirect customer
engagement, including referrals, social media conversations about products/brands, customer
feedback that contribute to companies’ revenue.
Independent Variable:
Leung, F. F., Gu, F. F., & Palmatier, R. W. (2022). Online influencer marketing. Journal of the Academy of
Marketing Science, 1-26.
Leung et al. (2022) provide a conceptualization of online influencer marketing. You can use the findings of
this paper to create a backbone for your session, providing some grounding on the definition and use of
influencer marketing. By no means is it required to discuss every detail of this paper. You could focus on:
a. What is online influencer marketing, and what makes it distinct from other marketing strategies?
Online influencer marketing (OIM) is a strategy in which a firm selects and incentivizes online influencers to
engage their followers on social media to leverage these influencers’ unique resources to promote the firm’s
offerings, with the goal of enhancing firm performance.
OIM can be understood as leveraging influencer resources
(including follower networks, personal positioning,
communication content, and follower trust) to enhance a
firm’s marketing communication effectiveness
b. What are the opportunities and threats of influencer
marketing? To which of these opportunities/threats
do the other two papers in this session speak?
Opportunities of OIM
• Targeting Benefits: Companies changing the focus from targeting desired consumer segments to
targeting influencers who can reach those segments.
o First benefit, Influencers build distinct personal brands and draw identity boundaries that attract
homogeneous, like-minded people who share similar characteristics and are more likely to buy the
products.
o Leveraging influencer´s networks allow firms to capture consumers´ changing preferences and
constantly attracting new followers, and therefore potential new customers.
• Positioning Benefits: Firms have a clear goal and position and value proposition for their products or
services – OIM can complement these firm lead-positionings. Followers search for people that share
similar positions, mind-sets, values, which can be used to leverage firm performance.
o First benefit, influencers positioning tends to evoke high market acceptance, satisfaction among target
consumers. Well positioned brands and influencers are likely to recreate or reinforce consumers brand
associations.
o Second benefit, influencers manage their content to reflect their positioning. The distinctiveness, or
uniqueness of influencers enables firms to distinct their brand with specific attributes to achieve
favorable positioning.
• Creativity Benefits: Influencers create unique, novel and creative content which firms can use to gain
access to their tacit knowledge what and how to talk about.
• Trust Benefits: Consumers are increasingly skeptical about traditional marketing tactics. The trust that
influencers earn from followers constitutes a valuable resource that firms can capitalize on. Followers
have more trust in their influencers because they appear more authentic because they promote
products by their intrinsic motivation, rather than marketing goals.
, Threats of OIM
• Content Control Threat: Outsourcing marketing actions to Influencers creates content control problems,
as multiple independent influencers differ in their content quality and messaging
• Customer Retention Threat: Maintaining customers trust and loyalty to the firm depends on influencers
and their trustworthiness and their loyalty to the brand. These capabilities lie beyond of one single
OIM campaign. It’s easy to spread information and exposure through influencers but afterwards the
brand needs to find ways to retain customers.
c. How can firms successfully manage online influencer marketing?
Firms need to manage influencers in a way that aligns with the companies’ goals:
1. Select the right people that fit the firms marketing needs
2. Monitor the influencers content creation process
3. Make the performance measurable and compare the results continuously to company goals
a. Engagement (likes, comments, shares, mentions, reposts)
b. Website traffic (tunnel measurement)
4. Make the content reusable for firms lead marketing communications
a. Re-use content that has been well engaged with on brand owned channels
b. Re-using content adds authenticity and social proof the band communication efforts
Hughes, C., Swaminathan, V., & Brooks, G. (2019). Driving brand engagement through online social
influencers- An empirical investigation of sponsored blogging campaigns. Journal of Marketing, 83(5),
78-96.
RQ: What drives sponsored blogging strategies?
Examining blogger characteristics, content characteristics and campaign incentives.
a. What are the important variables in this study (see Figure 1), and how are they hypothesized to
relate to each other?
Sponsored Blogging: Companies solicit influencers to post about specific products/services/brands.
Moderators:
• Social media platforms (blogs vs. Facebook) which vary in their level of distraction and engagement
• Stage of Consumer Decision Journey (CDJ) (awareness vs. trial), which imply higher levels of
motivation closer to trial.
Dependent Variable:
• Engagement (Blog platform engagement vs. Facebook platform engagement), indirect customer
engagement, including referrals, social media conversations about products/brands, customer
feedback that contribute to companies’ revenue.
Independent Variable:
