Over the influence : comparing the effects of digital influencers brand ownership strategies with brand endorsement strategies.

• Autor(a) principal: Luís, Joana Isabel Martins Barros
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/29248
• topic: Digital influencers; Purchase intentions; Brand attitude; Brand attachment; Perceived brand quality; Brand anthropomorphism; Social media; Make-up industry; Celebrity brand endorsement; Influenciadores digitais; Intenções de compra; Percepção de qualidade de marca; Redes sociais; Indústria de beleza; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

As customers’ spending habits move towards online platforms, brands are investing in their digital connection to customers, especially through social media. In this context, brands are using their digital tools to communicate, engage and ultimately build stronger relationships with their customers. Due to the fast rise of social media, digital influencers have gained a strong voice, which gave them a privileged position to communicate effectively with their audience. With this and through endorsements, brands have increasingly been using influencers as communication touchpoints for their targets. However, some influencers have taken the bar higher by going solo and are now using their large audience and strong reputation to launch their own ventures. With this in mind, the research objectives strive to address one main goal: to understand if (and how) the relationship of the influencer with a brand (owner vs endorser) affects the customer’s brand attitude and purchase intentions. The current thesis developed an online questionnaire with 149 respondents and quantitative data was collected by randomly exposing the sample to two different scenarios: influencer as brand endorsers compared to influencers as brand owners. Results show that influencers´ ownership has a significant but lower effect on Purchase Intention and Brand Attitude when compared with influencers´ endorsement. Additionally, Perceived Quality, Brand Anthropomorphism and Brand Attachment present a significantly positive correlation with Purchase Intention and Brand Attitude. However it was concluded that these were not possible explaining factors for the significantly different results found.