Social Media Influencer Endorsement: How Attitude Towards Endorsement Affects Brand Attitude

1. Introduction

Social Media has a reach to the world's population with no demographic and physiographic limitations (Alrubaian et al., 2019). Millions of people use social media platforms to connect, learn, share, and grow. In India from 2015, there has been a significant jump in the number of social media users from 142.23 million social media users to 351.4 million users in 2019. Influencer marketing is said to grow to an exponential $9.7 billion in the year 2020, and companies are shifting their strategy from mega influencer to micro-influencers (Influencer marketing hub, 2020). Globally, consumers are adapting, which represents a challenge to adapt communication strategies in this changing digital world. Marketers focus their campaigns around an intersection at a digital, local, and social level.

The evolution of social media started with Wikipedia's launch in 2001, after which Napster was introduced in 2002, which was a Kuala Lumpur, based social gaming site. MySpace was introduced in 2003. One of the most famous social media platforms, Facebook was introduced in 2004 at the same time, Orkut was launched, which was more popular among the Brazil and Indian population. With currently 2 billion users of Youtube, the video streaming platform was established in 2005. Twitter, the microblogging and social networking site, was established in 2006 with currently 321 million active users. Instagram was introduced in 2010 as a photo-sharing site and is now the most popular social networking (Irani, 2016).

Marketers have used these high rates of social media usage to their advantage to build positive brand evaluation using influencer marketing. Influencer marketing is a form of endorsement in which companies utilize the users on social media with a high following who are known as influencers to promote their products and brand (Kádeková & Holienčinová, 2018). This concept is then used by marketers to rope in Social Media Influencers (SMIs) for collaborations and sponsored posts shared by the influencer. These SMIs significantly impact brand evaluations and brand attitude (De Veirman et al., 2017). With the rise of influencers, the question also arises about “whom to believe in an environment where anyone can say anything about anyone” these mainly occur due to problems such as fake followers and fake news (Van Der Heide & Lim, 2016). This leads us to the concept of source credibility; this concept plays a very crucial role in influencer marketing, which helps analyze the attitudes towards the endorsement, which mediates the attitude towards the brand (Seiler & Kucza, 2017). An SMI should also fit well with the brand and the reason being an influencer who does not portray an image on the same lines as the brand might lead to a negative impact on the brand, so along with source credibility, brand congruence must be also tested. The research focuses on sponsorship disclosure (i.e.) if a consumer might react differently to a paid endorsement compared to an unpaid one. This research also focuses on social media influencers who have a large following through content creation on Instagram. This emerging trend of influencer marketing has shifted customer's trust from celebrity endorsers who read from scripted messages to SMIs with a genuine audience (Schouten et al., 2020). The research gap of a combination of crucial social credibility cues such as SMI follower count (Dhanesh et al., 2019), sponsorship disclosure and SMI-brand congruency (Breves et al., 2019) and primary dimensions of the source credibility model (expertise and trustworthiness) are taken into account and how they affect attitude towards brand while mediated by the attitude towards endorsement. Understanding the mediating effect of attitude towards endorsement via the factors mentioned above would help marketers understand and analyze an influencer before bringing them on board.