The Causes and Their Influencers in the Age of Digital Business: The Instagrammers' Influence in Shaping the Attitudes for and Against the Animal Products

Introduction

The marketing literature only recently has seen the rise of the term influencer. According to Chopra, Avhad, & Jaju (2021), influencer marketing is the action of an external person to influence consumers’ buying choices. As per The Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), influencer marketing is when a marketer identifies, seeks out, and engages with influencers in support of a business objective, and an influencer is a person who has a greater than average reach or impacts through word of mouth in a relevant marketplace (Fay et al., 2009). According to Silva et al. (2020), companies are adopting diversified strategies to engage consumers, such as geomarketing, multilevel marketing, and guerrilla marketing, among others, but none of these tactics has proven to be as efficient as marketing recommendations, known as word of mouth: “Nothing can be more compelling than receiving input from people who comment, naturally or almost naturally, on their personal experiences with particular products” (Silva et al., 2020, p. 158). Influencer marketing consists in identifying key communities and opinion leaders who are likely to talk about products and have the ability to influence the opinions of others (Morton, 2020).

Influencer marketing is a marketing strategy that uses the influence of key individuals or opinion leaders to drive consumers' brand awareness and/or their purchasing decisions (Lou & Yuan, 2019). However, for a sustainable strategy, marketers must focus on identifying the right influencers and using them to drive brand engagement by identifying the target audience for whom the communication would be relevant (Chopra et al., 2021).

Opinion leaders can influence others’ behaviors due to their appeal or connection with their audience, as well as their specialized knowledge and/or authority on a given topic (Torres et al., 2019). The endorsement of celebrities is not a new subject, but its understanding still requires new studies, especially regarding microcelebrities.

According to Erdogan (1999), the proportion of advertisements that used celebrities as endorsers was one in six in 1979, one in five in 1988, and one in four in 1997. However, we must observe that consumers today are more aware and informed, and better empowered than before to distinguish between a genuine recommendation and a simple endorsement (Chopra et al., 2021), and for this reason, it is important to note that not all celebrities are “natural influencers”.

In contrast to traditional marketing campaigns in which celebrities are featured to demonstrate the superiority and uniqueness of the brand, successful influence marketing campaigns require influencers who demonstrate familiarity and authenticity and maintain visual congruence with their followers (Vrontis et al., 2021). And contrary to traditional celebrities or public figures who are well-known via traditional media, social media influencers are “regular people” who become “online celebrities” by creating and posting content on social media (Lou & Yuan, 2019). For that reason, brands that use influencers without studying the fit between the influencer and the brand story are more likely to be considered inauthentic.

According to Silva et al. (2020), clothing is the category most endorsed by the digital fitness influencers, food (supplements and healthy, natural and/or organic foods without sugar, gluten, fat, oil and lactose) the second, and esthetic and cosmetics the third most endorsed category. Even though Instagram is one of the most influential networks nowadays (Y. Gupta et al., 2020; Nugraha et al., 2018), still exists a lack of academic research about this social platform, probably because Instagram is a relatively new phenomenon, which only in the last few years won capillarity (Djafarova & Rushworth, 2017).