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Abstract
Influencer advertising has sparked controversy among both consumers and regulators, in that influencer advertising’s very effectiveness is built on deceit, because consumers are often unaware of the persuasive intent. Empirical evidence on influencer advertising is built largely on the premise that disclosure will activate consumers’ reactance, as consumers will recognize the persuasive intent. Using a mixed-method approach (focus groups and survey), we contribute to the growing body of research on influencer advertising by demonstrating the role of three important boundary conditions in the relationship between knowledge of persuasive intent and activation of “resistant coping” mechanisms: trust, overconfidence, and transparency. Based on our focus-group results, we propose that two groups of outcome variables need further research attention: (1) consumers’ moral and affective advertising literacy and (2) other individual-level psychological outcomes, such as cognitive dissonance and reduced control over one’s time and productivity. In our further empirical test, we focus more specifically on perceptions of moral appropriateness of advertising, and we illustrate its importance for understanding how influencer advertising works.
Acknowledgment
Alysha Hachey’s research is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).
Notes
1 For the multigroup analyses, we conducted power analysis a posteriori for the “knowledge of persuasive intent” and “appropriateness” constructs using the mean and standard deviation for the same variables from the studies of Boerman and Müller (Citation2022) and Boerman et al. (682018) respectively. The results indicate that the sample size of the study provides acceptable power values.