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Top1. Introduction
The solution to a changing world is innovation. Companies have been forced to implement creative product design and marketing communication approaches because of the evolving nature of brand and customer relationships and the ever-increasing clutter. A successful communication strategy goes a long way toward ensuring the long-term viability of a brand (Brown et al., 2008; Lee & Kim, 2020). The communication networks enabled the brands to interact with their customers and involvement with the community (Hudson & Hudson, 2013).
The marketing ethos is to create content that can communicate and react to the target market over a long period. The decline in the use of conventional media and the growth of social networks have substantially affected knowledge and artistic content accessed and viewed by people (Kumar et al., 2010). Consumers are becoming more knowledgeable and, as a result, more critical of advertising messages as a result of increased digitization. Social media use is common among Millennials and the younger generation (Gottfried and Shearer, 2016). Consequently, it is increasingly necessary to get information from social media sites.
The emergence of social media has provided an opportunity for brands to communicate with consumers more transparently and organically. The use of social media brand influences is on the rise, and it has emerged as one of the most significant marketing trends of 2017 (Talavera, 2015). Influencer marketing refers to how powerful people help to transfer ideas online and offline (Lee & Kim, 2020; Forbes.com). Social media influences are digital or web celebrities who have a large number of followers across one or more social media sites and wield significant control over their followers (Agarwal et al., 2020). These online personalities are experts in a variety of fields, including travel, food, fashion, and lifestyle, among others.
Consequently, the idea of influencer marketing refers to the use of chosen influencers to build and/or endorse advertised content to the influencer's fans and the brand's target market (Yodel, 2017). Compared to the content created by a brand itself, content produced by an influencer is regarded as more authentic and organic (Talavera, 2015). According to the Influencer Marketing Global Survey Report (2019), consumers often share the content published by the influencers with friends and family, thereby increasing the audience reach, eWOM and increasing brand awareness. Entertainers and Fashion/beauty influencers are the top two most followed influencer categories.