Influencer Marketing: Influentials’ Authenticity, Likeability and Authority in Social Media

Influencer marketing is used to allude to a certain experience or feeling, and with numbers of social media and internet users rising all across the world, the potential influence and usefulness of influencer marketing continues to rise (Ranga & Sharma, 2014). While the choice of influences often follows the conventional persuasion theories, trust theories also play an immense role in determining how believable and ‘influential’ the influencer, their message and by extension the company, is. Upon integrating the trust and persuasion theories, this study developed four propositions. A total of 30 observations with power influencers were extracted by using the phenomenographic interpretive approach (Atwater et al., 2008). This study found that three most influential attributes were authenticity, likeability, and authority. Targeting was emerged as an important factor of effectiveness of the influencer marketing. Moreover, most of influencers were shifted from celebrity to non-celebrity