In recent years, social media influencers (SMIs) have brought dramatic shifts to the marketing trend. Apart from product endorsement and ad campaigns, they are increasingly hired by brands for promoting social causes including Black Lives Matter movement, COVID-19, and LGBTQ+ issues owing to their perceived authenticity and expertise (Open Influence, 2022). As such, brands promoting social causes to take ethical obligations to the society, namely, corporate social responsibility (CSR), has become an indispensable business practice (McWilliams & Siegel, 2001). Accordingly, past studies revealed that SMIs’ capability of creating authentic connection with target consumers and the fact that stakeholder awareness and authentic motives are preconditions for the success of CSR initiatives can create a synergic effect (Yang et al., 2021).

Influencers have become a critical component of marketing strategy to increase awareness, encourage consideration, and drive purchases. A new type of influencer, computer-generated and artificial intelligence-powered avatars, has emerged amid this boom. Despite the mixed marketing results virtual influencers deliver, they are generally thought to create similar engagement as human influencers. Consumers appear capable of developing complex psychological processes when engaging with virtual influencers. Even though the positive impact of influencers is evident, there is a growing concern about how they can affect consumers' well-being. The feeling of envy is a significant well-being concern in the social media world. Assuming virtual influencers can deliver similar emotional effects as human influencers, can we feel envy towards virtual influencers?

The social media influencer (SMI) phenomenon is attracting attention from academia and business. A SMI refers to an individual who has accumulated a sizable social network of followers and thereby has influence over others (Ki et al., 2020). Due to the influence SMIs possess, an increasing number of brands are approaching SMIs and asking them to create and share branded content that includes product placements or brand recommendations. This practice is commonly referred to as influencer marketing. Reflecting the trend of influencer marketing, this study investigated: (1) whether consumers are ‘inspired-by’ SMIs and ‘inspired-to’ adopt the exemplars of SMIs (e.g., SMIs’ lifestyles, styles, and recommendations) as their social defaults that provide desirable standards that consumers will like and follow, and if so, (2) what are its causal factors and effects, and (3) whether the inspiration mechanism between SMIs and consumers differs between male and female consumers. In so doing, we drew on social defaults theory (Huh et al., 2014) and customer inspiration theory (Böttger et al., 2017).

Using an experimental design, we investigated whether the relationship between apparel product novelty and consumers’ curiosity depends on perceived fashion influencers’ socioeconomic status. In addition, we investigated mediating role of curiosity in the product novelty effect on purchase intentions and intention to use a social shopping service.

While extant research examines the consumption of luxury products, the disposal behaviors of such products and business’ means for promoting this behavior through social media has yet to be examined. This research builds on belief congruence theory and the anticonsumption literature to understand how religiosity (with prescriptions against material possessions and performing actions just for show) influences disposal method of luxury goods and disposal behavior on social media. Specifically, findings show that extrinsically (intrinsically) religious consumers are more likely to throw away (donate) luxury products after use. The moderating influence of emotions is also explored to show that intrinsically (extrinsically) religious consumers are more (less) likely to use sustainable methods of product disposal for luxury and non-luxury products alike after being primed to feel shame/guilt in comparison to a control condition. A separate study manipulates product type (luxury vs. non-luxury) and product state (used vs. new), showing that extrinsically religious consumers are most (least) likely to use sustainable disposal methods when a product is used (new) and non-luxury (luxury). Additionally, findings show that identity mediates this relationship and has clear outcomes on social media behavior regarding product disposal and end-consumption behavior with luxury products. Implications for belief congruence theory and advertising practitioners are provided (with a specific emphasis on advertisers of luxury products using social media).

Recent research has pointed out the emergence of new online actors, especially in the domain of fashion and lifestyle—“social media influencers” or SMIs (Etter, Colleoni, Illia, Meggiorin, & D’Eugenio, forthcoming). SMIs are defined as “people who possess greater than average potential to influence others due to such attributes as frequency of communication, personal persuasiveness or size of—and centrality to—a social network.” As SMIs become professionals, with a mass audience of followers, they gain competence in generating sophisticated content such as creation of stories, videos, visuals, etc. (McQuarrie, Miller, & Phillips, 2013). As such, SMIs are tempted to leverage their online influence to partner with brands. One of the reasons brands collaborate with SMIs is that they are considered trustworthy and “one of the few forms of real, authentic communication” (Scott, 2015, p. 295). Authenticity is recognized in the marketing literature as an important attribute, as consumers increasingly desire authenticity in their products and brands (Chronis & Hampton, 2008). A notion of authenticity which has been gaining acceptance revolves around whether an individual or brand expresses their true self (Moulard, Raggio, & Folse, 2016). Holt (2002, p. 83) notes, “To be authentic, brands must be disinterested; they must be perceived as invented and disseminated by parties without an instrumental economic agenda, by people who are intrinsically motivated by their inherent value”. However, collaborating with brands may question SMIs authenticity as their inner desires to focus on products they are passionate about are challenged by commercial opportunities to showcase brands that they would not ordinary like. Their credibility might be questioned as the persuasive effect of their messages is often attributed to their perceived noncommercial nature as compared to branded advertisements. Despite growing research on influencers and acknowledged pressure of pursuing financial gains (Abidin & Ots, 2015), past research has overlooked the challenges to remain authentic when collaborating with brands. As such, our research focuses on the question: what are the strategies of SMIs to maintain authenticity while they are under commercial pressure? To answer it, we conducted a research in the context of fashion, beauty and lifestyle, as it is one of the most successful and visible domains of digital production. We analyze posts from 49 influencers participating in 9 brand campaigns that employed multiple SMIs simultaneously. These observations are complemented with 27 interviews with SMIs to understand “behind the scene” goals pursued to project this authenticity. Results suggest that SMIs implement two potentially complementary strategies expressing authenticity under commercial pressure: 1) passionate authenticity, which refers to one’s expressing of his/her inner self and being passionate even when involved in a collaboration, and 2) informational authenticity, which refers to being consistent with the facts and not lying about the partnership, the influencer or the products promoted. From a theoretical standpoint, the notion of passionate authenticity has been established in the previous literature (Moulard, et al., 2016), but we identify a new form of authenticity that we name informational authenticity. It thus extends the literature and builds on previous research to reframe the concept of authenticity (Grayson & Martinec, 2004; Morhart, Malär, Guevremont, Girardin, & Grohmann, 2015; Napoli, Dickinson, Beverland, & Farrelly, 2014). From a managerial standpoint, our findings should help SMIs manage their authenticity under threat as it suggest that they can either use Passion or Information. SMIs should be cautious to report the reality of the partnership and the product in their WOMM contents. Similarly, they should keep producing noncommercial messages about brands they are really passionate about. In the same vein, managers should be attentive to let SMIs select products in order to increase enthusiasm for the brand and minimize constraints to give room for personalized communication aligned with SMI’s style and opinions.

Anna Dello Russo has worked with H&M, the Sartorialist's Scott Schuman has written his second book and home-grown Susie Bubble has consulted for Gap, Armani and Selfridges to name a few. There is no doubt that these figures are key influencers in the world of fashion and they are turning their efforts and knowledge into fiscal benefits. Fashion blogs have become not only a form of user-generated content, a medium for communicating to the masses without any prior training or knowledge, but have also evolved to become a new marketing communications channel in their own right. Fashion writers are not only dictating content to esteemed fashion titles that were once only contributed to by the fashion journalist elite, but they are engaged as brand consultants with the aim of shaping the future direction of brands in terms of content, style and scope. When did all this power and influence happen and how can we measure it? This is the central question inherent to this study’s focus. The dynamic nature of digital, online and social media activities means that most research is out of date or getting closer to ‘expiry’ even as the ink dries on the page. To exemplify: research dated just three years ago still includes MySpace in a comprehensive list of online networks and social media sites (e.g. Mir and Zaheer, 2012) and ‘second life’ as an innovation [albeit this has been experiencing somewhat of a renaissance within certain consumer sectors in recent times]. This aside, the point is thus: academic scholarship cannot keep up with the rapid rate of digital change in the landscape, but it continues to try, as does this humble study. A volume of research has recently contributed to the understanding of the influence of social media in the fashion sphere, predominately from an electronic word-of-mouth (e-wom) perspective, for example (Bronner and Hoog, 2013; Fang, 2014; Hennig-Thurau, 2004; Kulmala et al., 2013; Liu, 2006; Trusov et al., 2009) engagement with social media (e.g. Campbell et al, 2012; Dhaoui, 2014). This body of literature has supplied a solid foundation for understanding why user-generated content may be shared and under what circumstances and to whom. However, a limitation of these significant contributions are reasons for propensity to influence, that is, once it has been shared, distributed and circulated, how do we measure the impact of this influence? Yes we can use analytics to quickly demonstrate quantitative and numerical impact in terms of followers, traffic, interaction, sales and (not so quickly) the wider reach of blogs on PR for brands, brand-metrics and customer engagement. But what about the wider influential impact of key social media writers and opinion leaders, or those that follow and listen to them: how can we evaluate this impact of influence? How does it work? Why does it work with some over others? We seek to find answers around this notion of social influence and ask: why do people listen to bloggers? Do consumers of this information distinguish between platforms: do they prefer blogs? Twitter? Picture-content through Instagram or Pinterest? Is there a gender difference? Considering also the rise in ‘erasable’ social media in the form of SnapChat, which lasts ten seconds before ‘self destructing’: what impact are these having in terms of influence in particular sectors like fashion, how can brands harness this power and use it to build equity, target new consumers, increase sales and revenue? In other geographical domains, such as China, where social media constraints and censorship are notable, emerging applications like WeChat are increasing in popularity, first with consumers, but retail and fashion brands are also beginning to endorse them to facilitate a meaningful conversation with their customers through these innovations. We also aim to explore the current state of play regarding terminology for social media contributors – are they still bloggers even though they create content across-platform? (It would be unusual for example, for a popular and credible blogger to only have a blog and no twitter or Instagram activity). Is the term blogger naturally all-encompassing or is it a misnomer that we need to create new terminology to explain these phenomena? Cullen (2014) the fashion magazine editor of Elle Australia created a blogger award ceremony to honour the contribution of these fashion influencers and comments that: “We picked the ones that we felt have the most traction with our readers. It is very clear we are in a blogger boom right now and everyone wants to jump on the bandwagon and [the nominees] gave fashion this new relevance. They took fashion and democratized it, so rather than have to see what the designer wanted you to see [on the catwalk], they took the runway fashion and put it together in their own ways. They made it wearable, as they mixed it with other labels and all those things that make an outfit work for real life.” This quote serves to illuminate an example of the commercial impact of fashion bloggers in the fashion sector and the relevance that influential opinion leaders believe they can have on their readership. Thus, we seek, through our research, to interrogate existing literature on social media, marketing, consumption and consumer psychological theories in the context of fashion influence with the aim of contributing to understanding in this fast-evolving transformative sector. Social media has been defined as: ‘A group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content. (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010, .61). Within this context, social media applications exist to facilitate user interaction, and include blogs, content communities, discussion boards and chat rooms, product and/or service review sites, virtual worlds, and social networking sites (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010; Mangold and Faulds, 2009). In this paper we focus on social networking, which refers to applications, such as Facebook and Twitter, Instagram/Pinterest and more disposable aps like Snapchat. Essentially, we take an all-embracing approach to understanding social media, as this is simply how it is used by consumers, in the virtual landscape (for example, users do not distinguish between platforms, they simply use the most appropriate means to communicate their content at that time). We aim to contribute a perspective that is original by investigating existing literature in two territories: social media influence and Social Impact Theory, which we will use as a theoretical perspective to explore the influence of social media on fashion. A Theoretical Lens: Social Influence Theory (SIT) After dismissing other theoretical frameworks for our study’s focus including: Uses and Gratifications theory; Involvement and Motivation, the choice to focus on Social Impact Theory (SIT) (Latane, 1981) was rationalized by the centrality of influence as a construct, to the characteristics of the theory. SIT (Latane, 1981) maintains, “as the number of people increases the impact on the target individual’s attitude and behavior enhances”. As influence is inherent to our aim, this theory, albeit being created almost two decades before the concept of social media, may have transferable qualities that may aid comprehension of understanding into the complexities associated with understanding the influence of social media in the fashion sector. This seemingly large leap from a traditional application of the theory to the virtual world is made more plausible by at least one previous study, that has started to also recognize the value of this framework for understanding online activity for example, Mir and Zaheer (2012) who use SIT in the contexts of social media and banking. The theory has not however, been used thus far in the realm of fashion and social media, thus, a study of this kind aims to contribute to knowledge in this field. Social impact has been defined by the founding father of the theory as: ‘Any of the great variety of changes in physiological states and subjective feelings, motives and emotions, cognitions and beliefs, values and behavior, that occur in an individual, human, or animal, as a result of the real, implied or imagined presence or actions of other individuals’. (Latané, 1981, p. 343) Latané (1981) created social impact theory to validate his hypothesis about how influence works, which led to the identification of three factors that make up social impact theory: 1) Strength: How important is the influencing group to the target of the influence; 2) Immediacy: How close in proximity and in time is the influencing group to the target of the influence; 3) Number: How many people are in the influencing group. Taking each one of these in turn, the leverage of these variables to a social media context seems obvious. Social media by its very nature encourages a ‘pull’ approach to groups or communities (hence the ‘strength’ variable); the ‘immediacy’ of social media in the sense that messages can be communicated and responded to in real time, have been facilitated by social media capabilities. Finally, the third variable of SIT is ‘number’; in a virtual world, there is a real sense that there is no limit to the amount of people you can communicate with. To exemplify, we refer to Facebook with its 9 Billion plus users as an example of this reach, or Lady GaGa with her 44 Million plus followers on Twitter. This succinct insight into SIT theory provides a short rationale as to its applicability to a social media context, specifically the fashion sector. A more in-depth analysis of its use and application to this study will be developed for the final paper following data collection.