The influencer effect on tourism : shifting adventure travel behavior towards more sustainability through instagram influencers

In the past few years, Instagram and the influencer marketing model has offered a significant amount of attention and attraction to the adventure tourism industry, sourcing large crowds of tourists to many “Instagram-famous” locations. However, the growth and practices of the industry raise concerns about sustainability. The influencer marketing model on the Instagram platform is a new digital relationship between influencers and followers that deserves exploration in marketing academia. This thesis researched how sustainability education and marketing within the influencer-follower relationship could impact the adventure tourism industry. Our exploratory research phase provided an overview of influencer marketing, the adventure tourism industry, and sustainable consumer behavior theory (focusing on the White et al. (2019) SHIFT framework) to highlight the interplay between these three subjects. Through conversations with adventure tourism and Instagram industry stakeholders, we captured primary accounts of the impact Instagram and influencers have on Norway’s adventure tourism market. Our causal research experiment, among a diverse sample of 360 international respondents, tested Instagram content promoting sustainable travel from the voice of an influencer to see if it could change followers’ travel behavioral intentions. We found that positive improvement to sustainable travel behavior intentions is indeed induced by Instagram influencer content, most successfully using a “tangibility” messaging approach, using “vivid imagery, analogies, and statistics to communicate to consumers” (White et al., 2019). This type of messaging should be implemented immediately by adventure tourism stakeholders on the Instagram platform to initiate the much-desired tourist education about sustainability behaviors. Key words: Influencer marketing, influencers, followers, Instagram, adventure tourism, sustainable consumer behavior, sustainabilit