Factors Affecting The Follower’s Attitude And Behavioral Decisions:An Empirical Study On Weibo Influencers

Due to prevalent use of social media in China and an upsurge of influencer marketing fascinated the interest of marketing scholars in recent ages.Scarce attention in the field of celebrity studies has been paid on factors affecting the followers’ attitude and behavioral decisions particularly,in milieu of Chinese internet celebrities.The current dissertation homilies this gap and conducted two studies;study 1 comprehensively examined the follower’s perception on different social media influencers i.e.,micro influencers in relative to mega influencers.Moreover,it offers a research model by incorporating the Consumer Doppelganger effect Theory,which identified specific attributes of beauty bloggers/vloggers(visual cues:attractiveness,expertise,and verbal cues:expertise,informativeness and interaction)which exhibits in their posts/videos.Specifically,we examined the effect of visual cues and verbal cues on follower’s visual attitude and verbal attitude,which triggers the follower’s conscious desire of mimicry,and leads to positive behavioral decisions.An online survey was administered from 383 Weibo users(micro n=195;mega=188)following micro and mega influencers,valid data were analyzed using multi-group analysis to make model comparison between micro influencers and mega influencers.Our results confirm that the visual cues(i.e.,attractiveness,expertise)and verbal cues(i.e.,expertise,informativeness and interaction)of posts have significant and positive effect on audience’attitudes(i.e.,visual cues engendered visual attitude and verbal cues engendered verbal attitude),which further leads to positive behavioral decisions via mimicry desire more towards micro influencers than mega influencers.While evaluating social media influencers,the effect of visual cues and verbal cues are equally important.Overall,effect of micro-influencers posts/videos are much stronger on follower’s attitude and behavioral responses than mega influencers,which shows that ordinary consumer’s content exerts a strong influence over their audience.On the basis of findings of study l,we conducted another study to examine the follower’s perception about information credibility of Chinese Weibo influencers.By employing the heuristic-systematic model,we specifically examined the influence of source credibility and argument quality(i.e.,informational cues)on information credibility of micro influencers,and using involvement as a moderator,and their relational impact on follower’s attitude and behavioral decisions.Using responses from 269 Weibo users in China,the results reveal that argument quality(i.e.,systematic cue)following source credibility(i.e.,heuristic cue),are significant informational cues effecting the perceived information credibility of consumers.The findings also demonstrate a rigorous impact of perceived information credibility on brand/video attitudes and purchase intention.We observed that source credibility and argument quality have positive interaction effects when viewer involvement is high than low.Theoretical and practical implications are discussed along with recommendations for forthcoming studies.