The Revolution(Race) of influencer marketing : a qualitative study of influencer’s perspective of how to represent an outdoor clothing brand

Background: The digitalization has challenged the retail fashion industry and forces them to continuously find new strategies to survive in today’s market. Nowadays, the marketing strategy works differently, and some marketing is built upon how a collaboration would look together with an influencer and how it should be communicated to the influencers followers. Purpose: The purpose will give a better perspective and understanding on why brands have started to implement influencer marketing strategy. Furthermore, to understand followers' attachments towards the influencers, which can be crucial to how the influencers will represent a brand to increase brand awareness. This is an interesting topic to investigate further to get a better understanding of the phenomenon that has made a great impact, but also some challenges in the fashion industry. Research questions: - How to compile a human band model in an influencer marketing perspective? - How do social media influencers represent outdoor clothing brands and how do followers gain relainance towards social media influencers? Methodology: Empirical data was collected through three semi-structured interviews from social media influencers. The interviews were conducted through online video meeting. A secondary data collection, netnography observation was also conducted through the social media influencers Instagram accounts. The material was then compiled with a thematic analytic method. The material was quantified and divided into the following three sub-categories: (1) autonomy: inspiration and creativity; (2) relatedness: trust and communication; and (3) competence: experience and brand. Conclusions: The study finds that social media influencers are as much reliant on their followers, as the followers are with them. The social media influencers have shown to be more dependent than what was expected from previous research, because they were usually described as opinion leaders with high credibility