‘You need to change how you consume’: ethical influencers, their audiences and their linking strategies

ABSTRACT

Our paper advances a subcategory of influencers who mobilise their audiences towards consumption-driven change; we label them ‘ethical influencers’. Using netnography and an archival dataset on ten ethical influencers, we delineate their unique challenges and positioning. Ethical influencers legitimate their accounts via a close-up of personal practices, as opposed to an articulated persona, and connect with divergent audiences to advocate for the needed change. Our paper describes the divergent audience groups and engagement styles: allies, inquisitives, detractors, and enigmatics. We also identify the ethical influencers’ linking strategies to connect these audiences with other market actors (e.g. ethical businesses and other ethical influencers) which include acting, humanising, framing, pivoting, and evangelising. This research advances influencer marketing literature and offers important managerial and public policy implications.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethical consumption
• digital culture
• influencers
• audience
• linking strategies

Acknowledgments

Aya Aboelenien and Alex Baudet acknowledge the financial support provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). We would like to thank Zeynep Arsel and Marie-Agnes Parmentier for their friendly reviews and constructive feedback on the earlier drafts of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The consulted websites were: https://www.treehugger.com, https://www.organized-home.com, https://www.vegansociety.com, https://vomadlife.com, https://parade.com, https://www.thegoodtrade.com, https://www.elle.com, https://chooseveg.com, https://izea.com.

2. Monetising Instagram was not an option before March 2020.

3. The research adheres to the requirements of the ethics review boards of their respective universities. All datasets are open access.

4. Both quotes are replies to the original post.

5. We didn’t provide a visual account for this post as it was a video.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes on contributors

Aya Aboelenien

Aya Aboelenien is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at HEC Montréal, Canada. Her research interests range from ethics and morality in consumption, to interpersonal relations, to market systems, with a sociocultural focus.

Alex Baudet

Alex Baudet is a Ph.D. candidate at HEC Montréal, Canada. Influenced by his work experiences in the video games industry and in online education, his research explores consumer culture in digital contexts.

Ai Ming Chow

Ai Ming Chow is a Melbourne Early Career Academic Fellow at the University of Melbourne, where she teaches and researches in the field of marketing. Her research focuses on examining the reflexive approach to Indigenous-settler relations to explore potential sites of transformation within and beyond the markets. She also studies influencer marketing, consumption and consumer culture.