The Interaction of Consumer, Endorser, and Brand Personality in Social Influencer Marketing: An Abstract

The importance of social influencer marketing as a means of brand communication is consistently growing. This is hardly surprising, as social influencers have the advantage to be generally perceived as authentic testimonials who can communicate in a customized way to the consumer target group. Certain social influencers can even attract a larger audience than an average television production. Thus, it is crucial to know the success factors of an influencer marketing campaign. Until now, research has mainly focused on global measures of success such as different measures of number of followers, pagerank, or retweets. However, practitioners sometimes state that these measures are too superficial. This presumption becomes further substantiated by numerous examples of social influencer campaigns that failed, although the endorser fulfilled the above mentioned criteria. Often, the reasons for these failures lie in a mismatch between influencer and brand. Hence, practitioners speculate that it would be relevant to consider the triad of (a) social influencer personality, (b) brand personality, and (c) consumer personality. An exemplary follow-up question may be whether it is important that the personality of the social influencer matches one of the brands. The work at hand picks up on this chain of thoughts: It investigates whether the interplay of (1) personality congruence between influencer and brand, (2) the identification of the consumer with the influencer, and (3) the level of product involvement have effects on constructs of brand perception (brand attitude, brand trust) and brand behavior (purchase intention). For this purpose, stimulus material in the form of social influencer profiles and posts endorsing two well-known brands. Hypothesizes testing occurs by means of structural equation modeling. The results indicate that (1) personality congruence between influencer and brand is the most important success factor, followed by (2) identification. (3) The level of product involvement is nearly insignificant. Based on these findings, implications for management and further research are developed.