| Author: | Chen, Yuting |
| Title: | The effects of influencer-product congruence on consumer decisions |
| Advisors: | Xu, Xin (MM) |
| Degree: | Ph.D. |
| Year: | 2022 |
| Subject: | Internet marketing Internet personalities Social influence Hong Kong Polytechnic University -- Dissertations |
| Department: | Department of Management and Marketing |
| Pages: | xi, 96 pages : color illustrations |
| Language: | English |
| Abstract: | With the development of influencer marketing, congruence of influencer characteristics and the endorsed product is widely considered important. In this thesis, I construct influencer persona dimensions and investigate the effect of two types of persona congruence issues (influencer persona-product congruence and influencer's sex-product congruence) on behavioral intentions (restaurant visit intention and social media engagement). Chapter 1 utilizes topic modeling to extract influencer persona dimensions using 193,374 Instagram post captions. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) results identify 13 inferred topics that can be the elements to build a persona. Then, I examine how congruence between influencer persona and endorsed product affects parasocial interaction that in turn influences social media audience's visit intention of the recommended restaurant. I conceptualize congruence characteristics between restaurant type (street-style vs. fine-dining) and influencer persona (luxury persona vs. non-luxury persona). An online experiment was employed, and SPSS PROCESS Macro was used for hypothesis testing. Overall, results reveal incongruence between restaurant type and influencer persona leads to more intention to visit the endorsed restaurant. Advertising recognition plays a crucial role in moderating the relationship between parasocial interaction and restaurant visit intention. This study adds value from the following three aspects: 1) I provide an understanding of influencer persona by analyzing objective data; 2) I highlight the effect of influencer persona and endorsed product incongruence from the perspective of luxuriousness; 3) I adapt the conceptualization of parasocial interaction in the context of influencer marketing and speculate the mediation effect of it; 4) I theorize the moderating effect of advertising recognition from parasocial interaction to restaurant visit intention. Drawing from research on influencer marketing, chapter 2 examines how influencer characteristics affect social media engagement in cosmetics endorsement. Moreover, I conceptualize social media influencer characteristics as consisting of two key components— influencer's sex and physical attractiveness. I develop hypotheses regarding how the physical attractiveness of influencers moderates the relationships between influencer's sex and disidentification, which mediates the relationship between influencer's sex and social media engagement. An online experiment was employed to test the research model empirically. SPSS PROCESS Macro results show that a plain-looking male influencer obtains more disidentification than a good-looking male influencer; however, a good-looking female influencer achieves more disidentification than a plain-looking female influencer, in turn, gets more social media engagement. This study makes three contributions to the literature: 1) I emphasize the effect of the incongruence between influencer's sex and product in promoting gender-typed products (e.g., male and cosmetics); 2) I adapt the conceptualization of disidentification in the context of influencer marketing and speculate its mediation role; 3) I investigate the moderating effects physical attractiveness in the chain of relationships from influencer's sex to disidentification and then to social media engagement. In conclusion, this thesis is expected to contribute to academics and practitioners by combining data analytics and lab experiment methods. Theoretically, it provides insights into influencer persona and congruity theory by constructing a new type of congruence between influencer characteristics and endorsed products. In practice, these findings offer suggestions for marketers to collaborate with proper influencers to promote products. |
| Rights: | All rights reserved |
| Access: | open access |
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