ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

Influencer marketing, a marketing strategy involving endorsements and product placements from individuals who exert social influence on their huge base of followers, has recently emerged as one of the most significant and trendy topics in both academia and practice. The purpose of this study is to examine a backfiring effect of influencer marketing by investigating how influencer type and perceived social distance from an influencer interactively affect consumers’ negative word of mouth (NWOM) intentions. Further, in order to illustrate the process, we propose blame attribution toward the influencer and the brand as serial mediators. The study recruited 145 US citizens through the Amazon Mturk platform. Participants were randomly assigned to one of the two conditions: cosmetic advertisement using either a social media influencer (YouTuber) or a celebrity influencer (actress) as endorsers. Then respondents read a hypothetical scenario that they experienced a product failure (e.g., pimples and redness) after the purchase. Finally, participants responded to questions about their perceived social distance from the influencer (moderator), attribution to the influencer (mediator 1), attribution to the brand (mediator 2), NWOM intentions toward the brand (dependent variable), several control variables and demographic factors. We performed bootstrapping analysis using the Hayes PROCESS macro in SPSS 23 to test our hypotheses of the moderated serial mediation model. The major results from this research are as follows. First, we verified that the interaction between influencer type and perceived social distance from the influencer had a significant effect on consumers’ NWOM intentions toward the brand. In particular, when consumers are close in social distance from the influencer, their NWOM intentions toward the brand were higher in the social media influencer than in the celebrity influencer condition. Second, blame attribution to the influencer and blame attribution to the brand serially mediated the interaction effects described above. In detail, consumers who watched the advertisement featured with a social media (vs. celebrity) influencer were more likely to attribute product failures to the influencer. Furthermore, the attribution to the influencer increased the attribution to the brand and thereby more NWOM intentions toward the brand, demonstrating the moderated serial mediation effect. The current article makes the first attempt to explore the dark side of influencer marketing, providing theoretical and practical implications. This research proposes a theoretical model, verifying that the interaction between influencer type and perceived social distance affects NWOM intentions toward the brand via attribution to the influencer and the brand in serial. Moreover, this paper suggests practitioners that it is necessary to take a differentiated approach in consideration of both influencer type and perceived social distance when they apply influencer marketing.