The emergence and explosive growth of social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Tweeter, etc. has dramatically changed both the way consumers shop and brands advertise. According to a study by Track Maven, Instagram is the most engaging social media platform nowadays with the most average interactions per post per 1,000 followers. It stimulates “Instagram influencer marketing” to develop rapidly and promotes a great variety of brands. It has fundamentally changed the balance of power between customers and brands because it allows peer recommendations to play a much larger role in purchasing decisions [13]. It has become one of the trendiest marketing strategies that focus on influential figures on Instagram rather than targeting on the market as a whole. Instagram influencer marketing highlights content creators who may impact their audiences’ buying habits. For example, shoppers who compare hotel reviews can simply search “hashtag plus hotel name (e.g. #hiltonnewyork) in Instagram and read people’s experiences with that hotel among related posts. Many of those posts were created by influencers who are collaborating with the brands to advertise. Based on activities of more than 12 million Instagram influencers between the first quarter of 2018 and the first quarter of 2019, Social bakers created a report to categorize influencers into three categories: micro-influencers who have fewer than 10,000 followers, macro influencers with 10,000 to 50,000 followers, and celebrities who attracts a million or more followers. The majority of Instagram influencers are “micro-influencers”. Their finding also reveals that the combined amount of sponsored content on Instagram for all three categories of influencers in North America has jumped 150% in the last year.

The objectives of this study are to explore the information source, assessment, and preferred styles of 3D virtual influencers(VI), to investigate the expected impact of advertisements with 3D VIs on brands, and to explore ways of expanding the use of 3D VIs. In-depth interviews with 40 males and females in their 20s and 30s were conducted and qualitative data were analyzed. The study results are summarized as follows. First, the information source of the 3D VI was SNS, acquaintances, and broadcasting. Second, 3D VIs were considered positively due to their attractive appearance, wide utilization, innovative use, freshness, separation from private identity, and time and cost savings, while considered negatively due to their unrealistic appearance and antipathy against replacing a person’s role. Third, the preferred appearance styles of the 3D VI differed according to the level of virtuality although the majority of interviewees preferred similar looks to real people with low virtuality. Fourth, diverse image qualities such as innovative, differentiated, trendy, high-value, professional, and future-oriented were considered as transferred to the brand advertised by 3D VIs. Fifth, advertisements with 3D VIs may help build positive perceptions of advertised brands that may lead to purchase behaviors for some consumers. Lastly, to expand the use of 3D VIs, the specific advantages of virtual models should be maximized with consideration of how to implement a variety of body types and images of models. Findings present an important foundation to generate strategies to better apply 3D VIs to the fashion market.

Focusing on the emerging influencer market of SNS (Social Network Service), This study attempts to clarify the priority of Influencer characteristics when the customer decided to purchase products through the promotion of influencers. Since the influencer marketing differs from the Online information source marketing, this study has an academic implication in that integrated the influence of the characteristics of the Online information sources and the characteristics of SNS contents. For this purpose, through the literature research on Information sources and Influencers, the characteristics of influencers were reconstructed and priorities were derived using the AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) technique. The upper layer of the AHP structure was set to expertise, trustworthiness, social attractiveness, and content attractiveness, and the lower layer structured the model with 13 subfactors. The results are summarized as follows. First, in the result of combining the importance of the 1st and 2nd classes, the detailed factors of expertise and trustworthiness, ranked from the top to six, are largely influenced in purchasing decisions in influencer marketing. Second, content attractiveness is the third rank in the 1st layer. Influencer marketing shows that content is more important than social attractiveness. Besides, the 7th to 9th positions of the overall rankings accounted for visual information, storytelling, and external attractiveness, which are the details of content attractiveness, and it is confirmed that it is more effective for influencer marketing to emphasize content attractiveness than social attractiveness. Although the influencer marketing differs from the existing information marketing, this study has an academic implication in that integrated the influence of the characteristics of the source and the characteristics of the contents.

Influencer marketing for the past decade has proven to have a powerful voice for brands in the age of digital marketing. The role of influencer(s) continues to have the ability to motivate social attitudes and behavior within their online community towards the brand(s) endorsed by the influencer. The communities built by these social media influencers continue to gain social acceptance with their authentic voices and aspirational content. There has been much research on the effectiveness of social media influencers for brands the past decade, and in this research, we will look towards virtual influencers (VIs), which are not human but are digital recreations with levels of human likeness. In our study, we want to get a better understanding of whether VIs are capable of achieving comparable success to the traditional influencer, as well as the advantages and shortcomings of both types of influencers hold.

Advanced web technologies enable consumers can create and exchange the content in various social media platforms (SMPs). As an interactive communication channel, SMPs serve as a new and updated form of online community where consumers and companies benefit from each other. Due to its minimal threshold in cost and skills necessary for accessing these SMPs, consumers use SMPs to acquire information in addition to seeking for socialization, which affect a purchase decision making process (Wang, Yu, and Wei, 2012). With various benefits of using SMPs among consumers, product reviews and photos posted by the customers in SMPs perform as an emerging type of endorsement to other users of SMPs. Individuals who actively share and disseminate the such product/service related-contents often become micro-celebrities among SMPs users. According to DiSilvestro (2016), customers no longer trust advertising created by brands, but they prefer to reply on reviews via SMPs, and in fact, 67% of consumers visit SMPs to reviews generated by other customers. In this regard, increasing number of brands tries to find influential micro-celebrities to build positive brand image and provide meaningful customer engagement which potentially increase sales in the end (Khamis, Ang, and Welling, 2016). Despite the increasing popularity of SMPs and influencers to brands, marketers struggle to measure their returns on investment, such as customer retention and increased customer lifetime value (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2010). Thus, a focal interest of this study is the role of a sense of community in building participants’ positive relational outcomes for a given brand that implementing the promotional activities via SMPs (Hudson et al., 2016).

This study attempts to investigate consumers’ perceptual process of influencer advertising and its impact on brand attitude formation on social media. Perceived congruence between the influencer and the product and sponsorship disclosure are manipulated as key independent variables. In so doing, this study examines whether consumers can infer two types of motives (affective vs. calculative) from different levels of perceived congruence (high vs. low) and sponsorship disclosure (present vs. absent). The impact of multiple motive inference on brand attitude is also examined in this study. The result indicates that perceived congruence of influencer and posting has a significant effect on the affective motive inference. When the posting is perceived to be relevant to and expected from the influencer, the participants infer the affective motive of the influencer. However, the participants do not infer calculative motives from the incongruent posting of the influencer. As native advertising can obfuscate the boundary between editorial and commercial contents (Conill, 2016), perceived congruence is significant to successfully cover the posting as a natural posting by influencer and induce affective motive inference. In addition, the disclosure of sponsorship did not reveal any effect on the calculative and the affective motive inferences. Even though the disclosure of sponsorship can make viewers recognize an advertising intent (Boerman, Willemsen, & Van Der Aa, 2017), the message did not induce motives inference behind it. It is significant to investigate whether there are intervening variables that moderate the linkage between sponsorship disclosure and motive inference processing. Furthermore, affective motive inference impacted the attitude for the brand whereas calculative motive inference exerted no significant effect. These findings suggest that when the product promoted in influencer advertising is congruent with the influencer, consumers form positive attitude toward the brand through affective inference processing. To successfully implement influencer advertising, marketers should design a content congruent with the influencer’s original postings and encourage audience to engage in affective motive processing.

In the world of SNS, once ordinary users get recognized for discriminated fashion taste, they affect other users’ choice of fashion products. Fashion companies capture the importance of these influencers and tries to take advantage of their ability. However, the benefits offered to influencers such as financial compensation may provoke negative consumer reactions. The purpose of this study is to identify what aspects of SNS influencers and how they influence other fashion consumers. We suggest that influencers’ self-disclosure and authenticity of posts are important factors which elicit positive response from consumers. We also investigate the psychological mechanism of envy which can mediate the impact of self-disclosure and authenticity on consumer response. This study was conducted by an online survey of 120 Korean women in their 20s and 30s with a 2 x 2 between-group experimental design. The data was collected from 28 November to 5 December 2016. The collected data was analyzed using SPSS 23.0 for ANOVA analysis and regression analysis. The results were as follows. The main effect of authenticity was confirmed, while self-disclosure did not play a significant role, which indicates authenticity is the main factor in exercising influence on consumer response. The interaction of authenticity and self-disclosure was also observed. The participants of high in both self-disclosure and authenticity showed the strongest consumer reaction. However, the participants of high self-disclosure and low authenticity induced the weakest consumer response. For the impacts of self-disclosure and authenticity on envy, the participants exposed to the condition of both high self-disclosure and authenticity showed benign envy. On the other hand, malicious envy was aroused when both self-disclosure and authenticity were low. In relations between authenticity and consumer response, partial mediating effect of benign envy and malicious envy was confirmed. But, there was no mediating effect between self-disclosure and consumer response. This research on consumer response to influencers’ posts will provide key implications to fashion companies in building marketing strategies. In order for influencers' posts displaying their daily lives to have a positive impact on consumer response, not only self-disclosure but authenticity has to be considered. Such posts can induce benign envy and subsequently impact consumers indirectly. Influencers’ posts which narrow the gap between daily lives and products and raise the authenticity are important keys to successful marketing.

디지털혁명이 세상을 주도하는 기업 환경에서 경쟁력을 제고 할 수 있는 새로운 이론과 전략연구는 산업혁명 이후에 끊임 없이 제기되어왔다. 디지털 시대에는 인류 문명의 발전적 도약이 시장의 통찰력을 요구하는 방향으로 새롭게 진화하고 있다. 마켓 4.0시대에 변화된 환경에 맞는 마케팅 전략은 사람을 중심으로 하여 지인 간의 상호작용과 콘텐츠 생산 및 소비의 순환 서클을 구성하는 네트워크 구조로 가고 있다. 이에 SNS 뉴미디어를 통한 혁신적인 마케팅이 대두되고 있는데 그 중심에 서 있는 부류가 바로 소셜 인플루언서이다. 본 연구에서는 과거의 수직적인 마케팅이 아니라 수평적인 마케팅을 통해 소셜 미디어를 무대로 활동하고 있고, 소셜 마케팅의 새로운 주역이 된 인플루언서 마케팅 영역에 대한 필요성을 고찰하고 근간에 대한 이론적 요소를 정리하였다. 그리고 실제 소셜 인플루언서 활동에 대한 분석, 그리고 평가와 전략의 필요성에 대한 근거를 제시하고 그에 적합한 평가 도구를 제시하였다. 앞으로 인플루언서 평가 도구 활용을 통하여 SNS에 기반한 바람직한 콘텐츠의 전파가 기업과 개인에게 새로운 마케팅 강화 전략으로 발전할 수 있기를 기대한다.

최근 기업에서는 자사 브랜드 또는 제품에 인플루언서를 활용한 마케팅이나 캠페인 활동을 전략적으로 펼치고 있는 사례가 많아졌다. 특히 소셜 네트워크상의 인플루언서 마케팅은 해외에서는 이미 활성화 되있으며, 국내에서도 지속적으로 늘어나고 있는 추세이나 SNS상에서의 인플루언서 유형과 제품에 따른 세부적인 연구와 미디어 인게이지먼트에 대한 소비자 반응 연구 측면에서는 선행연구가 희박하다. 일반적으로 국내의 소비자들이 SNS상에서의 제품 광고나 마케팅을 접하였을때 느끼는 정도는 인위적인 차원인데 반해, 인플루언서 즉 영향력 있는 1인을 내세워서 그들의 라이프 스타일에 스며들어 제품 을 보여주는 형태일때의 만족감이나 호기심, 주목성, 긍정적인 반응 등의 차원이 어떠할지 그 결과에 대한 소비자의 반응을 세부적으로 알아보는것이 필요한 시점이다. 이 연구는 소셜 네트워크상에서의 인플루언서를 활용한 제품이 소비자들의 관점에서 어떻게 받아들여지는지 소비자들의 평가를 조사하고자 인게이지 되는 유형중 사전조사를 통한 결과로 주목성이 제 품태도 및 구매의도에 어떠한 영향이 있는지 연구하였다. 그 결과 주목성의 고집단에서는 전문가가 더 높은 영향이 있으며, 저집단에서는 유명인이 높은 영향이 있음을 나타냈다. 따라서 소비자들의 주목성을 더 끌어올리기 위해서 인플루언서 유형 을 유명인에서는 자사 제품이나 브랜드에 대한 이미지와 일치하거나 전문성이 있는 유명인, 또는 제품의 전문가를 적절히 활용하면 소비자 평가에 긍정적인 효과가 높아질것으로 보여진다. 본 연구의 방향에 따른 결과로 기존의 전통 미디어와 다 르게 빠르게 변화하는 웹 2.0 시대에 맞는 미래지향적인 미디어로 SNS 마케팅 전략을 구사하여 소비자들로 하여금 제품에 대한 진정성, 신뢰감 및 공감을 형성시켜, 기업의 제품이나 브랜드 마케팅 활동에 도움이 될 것이라 생각한다.