Peer Influence Versus Influencer Marketing: Social Proof and Purchase Intentions Among Adolescent Consumers

Source abstract

Social media has changed how adolescents come into contact with product recommendations by combining personal and business communication in a single virtual space. A recommendation from a friend can sit next to one from an influencer who has thousands of followers, generating a consumer experience where social ties, trust, expertise, and business motives can coexist. This research seeks to determine whether there are different reactions to peer and influencer recommendations when assessing clothing. Sixty high school students and recent graduates participated in a within-subject experiment where participants assessed two comparable recommendation stories; one from a social media influencer with roughly 500,000 followers and the other from a close friend. Participants were asked to rate the influencer on their trustworthiness, expertise, advertising motive, and purchase intentions on a five-point Likert scale. Trust and purchase intention toward the peer recommendation were found to be higher than those for the influencer recommendation. Perceived expertise was not found to differ between the two sources of information. The influencer recommendation was more often seen as commercial than the peer recommendation, which was nearly always perceived as non-commercial. In the forced choice task, 76.7% of participants chose the peer recommendation as being more influential, while 20.0% considered both recommendations equally influential, and 3.3% chose neither. Among the recommendations of the influencer condition, those perceived as non-commercial were more influential on purchase intention than those perceived as commercial, and advertising intent was negatively related to purchase intention. Additionally, the results also suggest that adolescents' reactions to influencer recommendations may be more dependent not only on audience size and perceived influencer expertise, but also on how adolescents perceive recommendations as being authentic signals of interpersonal relations or as advertising.