Building Brand Evangelism Through Social Media Micro-Influencers: a Case Study of Cosmetic Industry in Thailand
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International Journal of Social Science Research eISSN: 2710-6276 | Vol. 2, No. 3, 84-99, 2020 http://myjms.moe.gov.my/index.php/ijssr International Journal of Social Science Research eISSN: 2710-6276 | Vol. 2, No. 3, September 2020 http://myjms.moe.gov.my/index.php/ijssr BUILDING BRAND EVANGELISM THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA MICRO-INFLUENCERS: A CASE STUDY OF COSMETIC INDUSTRY IN THAILAND Kanyawee Pornsrimate1* and Anon Khamwon2 1 2 Faculty of Business Administration and Accountancy, Khon Kaen University, Khon Kaen, THAILAND *Corresponding author: [email protected] Article Information: Abstract: In an age of digitalized interactions, social media micro-influencer is a contemporary marketing Article history: approach for the company to engage with online Received date : 19 June.2020 consumers. Surprisingly, researchers have little insight Revised date : 26 July.2020 into how social media micro-influencer influences the Accepted date : 5 September 2020 consumer-brand relationships in the marketing literature. Published date : 25 September 2020 This study, therefore, investigates the mechanism by which To cite this document: social media micro-influencer characteristics (i.e., specific content, authenticity, secret sharing, and the meaning of Pornsrimate, K., & Khamwon, A. the influencer) placed on brand engagement, brand love, (2020). BUILDING BRAND EVANGELISM THROUGH SOCIAL and brand evangelism. A model of the study is tested by MEDIA MICRO-INFLUENCERS: A using data collected from the followers of cosmetic micro- CASE STUDY OF COSMETIC influencers on Facebook in Thailand. The findings based INDUSTRY IN THAILAND. on structural equation modeling demonstrated that the International Journal Of Social Science social media micro-influencer characteristics elicited Research, 2(3), 84-99. higher levels of brand engagement and brand love, which, in turn, mediated the effect of social media micro- influencer characteristics on brand evangelism. The results evidently showed that brand engagement and brand love are the key concepts in the process of building brand evangelism through social media micro-influencer. This study represents one of the pioneer attempts to theoretically integrate brand engagement, brand love, and brand evangelism in an influencer marketing context. This integration offers valuable insights for marketing academics in a better understanding of the process of brand evangelism and for the companies in improving their influencer marketing strategies. 84 Copyright © 2020 ACADEMIA INDUSTRY NETWORKS. All rights reserved International Journal of Social Science Research eISSN: 2710-6276 | Vol. 2, No. 3, 84-99, 2020 http://myjms.moe.gov.my/index.php/ijssr Keywords: Social media micro-influencer, Brand evangelism, Brand engagement, Brand love, Thailand. 1. Introduction In the past two decades, the upswing of social media channels has attracted millions of users across various platforms (Xu & Pratt, 2018). Social media serves as a tool for searching and producing information (Kapitan & Silvera, 2016; Shoham & Ruvio, 2008). Nowadays, consumers widely use the internet to search for information and reliable opinions to evaluate products and services (Shoham & Ruvio, 2008) that satisfy their self-definition (Kapitan & Silvera, 2016) and congruent with their value (Kelman, 1961). Moreover, it can be recognized that ordinary people increasingly use social media to share their personal opinions, lifestyles, experiences, and feelings (Meng & Wei, 2015). This phenomenon is manifested as a new possibility for ordinary people to become an online influencer (Xu & Pratt, 2018). For this reason, influencer marketing is one of the most critical issues facing marketers today (Oyesomi, Okorie, Ahmadu, & Itsekor, 2014). In academics, the notion of social media influencer has received considerable attention in recent years. Growing concerns center particularly on social media influencers with a large number of followers (De Veirman, Cauberghe, & Hudders, 2017; Jin & Phua, 2014). The abundant of researches highlighted that social media influencer significantly evokes purchase intention (Colliander & Dahlén, 2011; Hsu, Lin, & Chiang, 2013; Meng & Wei, 2015), generates word-of- mouth (Casaló, Flavián, & Ibáñez-Sánchez, 2018; Hughes, Swaminathan & Brooks, 2019) and builds a brand relationship with consumers (Colliander & Dahlén, 2011; Hughes et al., 2019). While this strategic power of social media influencer has triggered a plethora of researches in mega- and macro-influencers, researchers have devoted less attention to micro-influencers who are ordinary people with a following between 1K-99K (Gómez, 2019). On the other hand, in practice, micro-influencer becomes a pressing item on the corporate agenda as a new approach to reach more consumers and strengthen the consumer-brand relationship (Jackson & Ahuja, 2016). The company found the potential of micro-influencer generating the highest interaction and engagement representing 82 percent of consumers who are likely to follow micro-influencer recommendations (Nachum, 2019). For example, cosmetic brands are putting more focus and more budgets into micro-influencers representing 40 percent of influencer marketing budget, compared to the celebrities which stood at only 28 percent (Mulqueen, 2019). Thus, with respect to this issue, marketers need a better understanding of the factors they can leverage to achieve successful influencer marketing strategies if they want to take further steps toward the micro-influencer campaign. The present study aims to fill this void in branding and marketing literature by developing a comprehensive process of brand evangelism with regard to social media micro-influencer characteristics as the primary antecedents together with brand engagement and brand love. 85 Copyright © 2020 ACADEMIA INDUSTRY NETWORKS. All rights reserved International Journal of Social Science Research eISSN: 2710-6276 | Vol. 2, No. 3, 84-99, 2020 http://myjms.moe.gov.my/index.php/ijssr 2. Literature Review 2.1 Theoretical Background The first step in understanding an influencer marketing is to uncover the implicit definition of an influencer. The term influencer can be described based on the definition of opinion leader which was firstly introduced in the field of political communication (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, & Gaudet, 1944). Opinion leader refers to “a group of populations which influence other segments in each particular topic such as movies, politics, fashions, marketing, and education” (Katz, Lazarsfeld, & Roper, 2017, p.25). An explanation for the role of opinion leader was drawn from the mass media flow theory, namely the two-step flow theory of communication (Katz et al., 2017). In regards to the theory, an audience is an active person who is predisposed by their social networks (Dlodlo, 2014). It may be assumed that information from the media is transferred to the general public indirectly emerged through opinion leaders (Dlodlo, 2014; Kenechukwu, 2015; Oyesomi et al., 2014). Contrary to the magic bullet theory, which argued that mass media directly influences on the general public, the two-step flow model highlighted that media information flows from its source to receivers in two stages (Dlodlo, 2014). First, opinion leaders initially consume specific media information from the original source and interpret the information through their own perspectives, values, and beliefs (Kenechukwu, 2015). Thereafter, the messages from the opinion leaders are transmitted to their social networks who are less-active members of the public (Dlodlo, 2014). With the generalization of social media and the rapid development of communication leads to a new type of opinion leader called influencer (SanMiguel, Guercini, & Sádaba, 2018). An influencer can be defined as an individual who has active mind and well connected to others with the influential activities (Dân, 2018) that based on their passion (SanMiguel et al., 2018), expertise, perspectives, and judgment (Ki & Kim, 2019). Applying the two-step flow theory to social media influencer, it can be recognized that consumer purchase decision is influenced by the influencers surrounding them such as friends, family members (Chatzigeorgiou, 2017), celebrities, bloggers, (Mohr, 2014), YouTubers, Instagrammers, etc. (SanMiguel et al., 2018). 2.2 Social Media Micro-Influencer Characteristics To capture the effect of social media micro-influencer on brand evangelism, key characteristics of influencers are the most commonly important issue for this study. Thus, we seek to shed light on four dimensions of social media influencer characteristics extracted from previous researches. (1) Specific content, by definition, is an attribute that influencers provide uniqueness of posted content (Casaló, 2018; Fernandes, 2018) reflecting certain skills and influencing within their peer group. They tend to generate specific content that corresponds to their interests and normally specializes in a specific area (Casaló, 2018; Fernandes, 2018; Gómez, 2019). The previous literature pointed out that unique content positively encourages consumer engagement (Hollebeek & Macky, 2019) such as comments, likes, and sharing (Godey et al., 2016). 86 Copyright © 2020 ACADEMIA INDUSTRY NETWORKS. All rights reserved International Journal of Social Science Research eISSN: 2710-6276 | Vol. 2, No. 3, 84-99, 2020 http://myjms.moe.gov.my/index.php/ijssr (2) Authenticity can be defined as a characteristic of influencer who behaves according to his/her true self by providing content based on