With the raise of artificial intelligence (AI), a new form of influencers has entered the proposition of marketing strategies for brands. Virtual influencers (VI’s) have shown their potential for brands in general, fashion lifestyle, or fashion luxury, even being more impactful in specific aspects than traditional influencers. Zooming in on sports, the VI space has been discovered by some brands already, yet for lifestyle sports products only. The performance sports products environment is still untouched. This study aims to identify the potential goals to be achieved for sports brands creating human-like virtual influencers to implement in their performance range of products strategy.

Virtual influencer marketing is an emerging research area due to the increasing popularity of virtual influencers across the social media landscape. However, existing literature falls short when it comes to explaining how consumers perceive the attributes of virtual influencers and what their roles are in determining the cognitive acceptance of the messages they communicate. To address the research gaps, this study pursued the objective of exploring the cognitive processes of individuals being exposed to the information elicited by virtual influencers. We adopted Social Influence Theory, which postulates that there are three processes of influence acceptance, namely compliance, internalisation and identification, each of which is conditioned by a set of different factors. To address the research objective, this study was carried out in two stages. In the first exploratory stage, we drew on relevant research to identify the attributes of virtual influencers, which could predict the three influence acceptance processes. To ensure the accuracy of the results, three approaches to the validation and filtering of attributes were used, i.e.: a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of 126 papers discussing the characteristics of influencers and a survey-based ranking of the importance of the generated attributes. As a result, we found that the top 8 statistically significant factors are warmth, relatedness, interactivity, competence, empathy, uniqueness, fairness and credibility. In the second stage, based on a sample of 601 respondents, we analysed the associations of the identified attributes with cognitive processes using a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). The analysis showed different configurations of the core and peripheral predictors of compliance, identification and internalisation. For a high level of compliance, a high level of interactivity is a core condition; for a high level of identification, empathy, competence, fairness, interactivity, and credibility act as core predictors. A high level of internalisation is associated with two core predictors, namely interactivity and relatedness. The findings of the study contribute to the extant literature on virtual influencers by providing empirical evidence about the cognitive acceptance of influence elicited by virtual influencers and the characteristics of non-human opinion leaders that shape consumers’ attitudes and behaviour. The findings offer practical insights into how to enhance the persuasiveness of virtual influencers’ messages.

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).

The present study compared the effectiveness of virtual influencers (VIs) to human influencers through the theoretical lens of the uncanny valley and parasocial relationship using an online experiment. Specifically, we posited that highly humanlike VIs may evoke the feeling of the uncanny valley, as compared to human influencers or cartoonlike influencers, which, in turn, would act as a psychological barrier to building a parasocial relationship with the specific type of virtual influencer and decrease advertising attitude. The results indicated that people do feel the uncanniness from both highly humanlike and cartoonish influencers as compared to human influencers. This particular psychological experience negatively influenced the parasocial relationship, which, in turn, negatively affected the attitude toward a social media advertisement featuring the VIs. However, importantly, this effect was moderated by individual differences in anthropomorphism. This is one of the first studies that directly compared the effectiveness of different types of social media influencers in a rigorously designed experimental setting and expands the previous research on Vis, uncanny valley, and parasocial relationship. Both theoretical and managerial contributions of the study were discussed.

Considering the popularity of virtual influencer (VI) marketing while its effectiveness remains fully unexplored, there is a need of academic attention testing consumer responses to VIs in comparison with human influencer marketing. Hence, this study aims to fill this gap by comparing consumers’ perceptions of a human versus virtual influencer’s endorsement. Specifically, based on the construal level theory and psychological reactance, this study investigates how consumers differently evaluate human and virtual influencers’ endorsement motives, which may further influence their attitudes toward a brand, advertising (i.e., endorsement), and an influencer and purchase intentions. Additionally, the moderating role of the number of endorsements (single vs. multiple) and perceived innovativeness are examined.

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?

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.