Influencer Marketing Thesis

ITUNIVERSITYOFCOPENHAGEN
SUBMISSION OF WRITTEN WORK
Class code:
Name of course: Digital Innovation & Management
How a brand can better identify the right influencer within
the fashion industry in the US for its influencer marketing campaign
Hanne Westh Nicolajsen
Course manager:
Course e-portfolio:
Thesis or project title:
Supervisor:
Full Name: Birthdate (dd/mm-yyyy): E-mail:
1. @itu.dk
2. @itu.dk
3. @itu.dk
4. @itu.dk
5. @itu.dk
6. @itu.dk
7. @itu.dk
Alessandro Bogliari 18/05/1991 albog

How a brand can better identify the right influencer
within the fashion industry in the US for its influencer
marketing campaign
Master’s Thesis, MSc in Digital Innovation & Management

Alessandro Bogliari

Thesis supervisor: Hanne Westh Nicolajsen

Submission date: 2nd
April 2017
Digital Innovation & Management, IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

1
Abstract
The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how brands can better identify influencers on Instagram
for their influencer marketing campaigns. For instance, this thesis analyzes the actual state of
influencer marketing, its main issues and challenges through a quantitative survey to influencer
marketing agencies and platforms and two qualitative interviews to experts. Moreover, this thesis
presents quantitative findings about micro and macro-influencers within the fashion industry in the
United States market, focusing especially on concepts such as engagement rate and price per
promoted post. The application of mixed method approach, that included both qualitative and
quantitative methods, provided me a wider overview of the data and a holistic understanding of the
topic. In addition, the data scraping methodology has been used in order to automate the process of
data gathering and a tool has been coded in JavaScript to display the information obtained. Finally,
using the data gathered and the information obtained from experts, a guideline for brands was
outlined. This guideline, which is the ultimate goal of this thesis, presents steps to follow in order to
better identify influencers on Instagram within the fashion industry.

Keywords: influencer marketing, influencer, influencers, micro-influencer, macro-influencer, Instagrammer,
Instagrammers, influencer marketing guidelines, influencer marketing budgeting

2
Table of content

Abstract 1
1.0 Introduction 4
1.1 What is Influencer Marketing 4
1.2 Who is an influencer 5
1.3 The growth of Influencer Marketing 6
2.0 Problem Area 9
2.1 Problem formulation 10
2.1.1 Research questions 11
3.0 Practical State of Influencer Marketing 12
3.1 Influencer Marketing Players – Influencers, Agencies and Platforms 13
3.1.1 Types of Influencers 13
3.1.2 Influencer Marketing Platform and Agencies 16
3.2 Influencer Marketing Channels 17
3.3 Engagement, impressions and reach 18
4.0 Methodology 21
4.1 Philosophy of Science 21
4.1.1 Ontology 22
4.1.2 Epistemology 22
4.2 Abduction 24
4.3 Literature review methodology 25
4.4 Data collection 28
4.5 Mixed methods approach 29
4.6 Qualitative research 29
4.6.1 Interviews 30
4.7 Quantitative research 32
4.7.1 Survey 32
4.7.2 Data scraping 35
4.8 Data analysis 37
4.9 Reliability and validity 38
4.9.1 Reliability 38
4.9.2 Validity 39
4.10 Limitations and Delimitations 40
4.10.1 Limitations 40

3
4.10.2 Delimitation 40
5.0 Literature review 41
6.0 Theories 45
6.1 Consumer buying process 45
6.2 Buying behaviour model 46
6.3 Combination of the theories - Creation of the operational model 49
7.0 Analysis 50
7.1 Survey results 50
7.2 Survey key findings 55
7.3 Interview results 56
7.4 Interviews key findings 60
7.5 Combining survey and interviews key findings and answering the first research question 60
7.6 Data scraper creation 61
7.6.1 Scraper code 64
7.7 Data scraping results 65
7.8 Data scraping key findings 69
7.9 Pay Per Promoted Post (PPPP) Formula Creation 70
7.10 Combination of PPPP Formula with Data Scraper Results and answer to the second research
question 73
8.0 Discussion 78
9.0 Conclusion 80
10.0 Legal issues and ethical questions 82
11.0 Future perspectives 83
12.0 Bibliography 84
13.0 Sitography 88
Appendices 93

4
1.0 Introduction
1.1 What is Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is a new practice within the digital marketing field that practitioners seem to
use more and more. For instance, looking at the Google Trends for this term (Figure 1), it is easy to
see a huge rise worldwide in the last 5 years.
Figure 1: Interest over time on the term “Influencer Marketing” – Source: Google.com/trends
Influencer Marketing is a new approach to marketing that “directly addresses the most common
sales barriers within prospective customers and focuses attention on those individuals who advise
decision-makers” (Brown & Hayes, 2008, p. 12).
In order to understand in practical terms what is this growing trend, a concrete example of an
influencer marketing campaign was made by the brand Birchbox. This beauty company teamed up
with Emily Schuman, a lifestyle blogger with more than 260,000 Instagram followers and she
promoted Birchbox’s products posting five photos on Instagram, which received 18,000 likes and
reached half a million of consumers (Furgison, 2016).
Another interesting case study to mention is the product placement campaign of Lokai , a company 1
that produces wearables: during the Coachella festival – a festival that according to Digiday (Biron,
1
https://www.instagram.com/livelokai/

5
2016) in 2015 had 200,000 attendees between the ages of 18–24 years old - Lokai made partnerships
with different influencers on Instagram: one of those was the instagrammer Helenowen that 2
published a single photo promoting Lokai products and receiving 36,600 likes. In total, “Live Lokai’s
campaign reached over 40 million people, earned 2.2 million likes, and received 14,000 comments”
stated Mediakix (2016).
In other words, Influencer Marketing is a form of marketing in which brands and influencers
collaborate to achieve a win-win result through a working partnership: brands win in terms of brand
awareness, engagement which can turn into increasing sales, while influencers win in increasing
their fan base and getting money for their service.
1.2 Who is an influencer
We can define an influencer as “an individual with an online presence who has the potential to
influence the opinions and behaviors” of his/her target audience, as stated on NeoReach by
Talavera (2016), an influencer marketing platform.
Influencers, unlike celebrities, can be anyone within any industry with an “audience” and a
communication channel that allows him/her to speak his/her mind. Influencers are people always
connected to consumer groups, community tribes and industry associations (Dizon, 2015). As
outlined before with a couple of examples, influencers can help brands by affecting their followers
and persuading them in their decision making process. A case study conducted by Defy Media – an
American digital media agency that produces online content for 12-34 years old viewers – stated that
62% of 18-24 years old of the people interviewed would try – at least once – a product or brand
recommended by a YouTuber (Defy Media, 2016).
2
https://www.instagram.com/helenowen/

6
1.3 The growth of Influencer Marketing
For the purposes and relevance of this thesis, it is important to stress the reason why Influencer
Marketing is growing so much and the reason why a lot of brands are so interested in it. One of the
major reasons is that “74% of consumers rely on social media to influence their purchasing
decisions” (Bennett, 2014 in Woods, 2016, p.5) and also that, according to Nielsen, “92% of
consumers believe recommendations from friends and family over all forms of advertising” (Whitler,
2014).
Moreover the concept of trust between companies and consumers is changing: for instance, 88% of
the consumers interviewed by BrightLocal (2014) on a Local Consumer Review Survey stated that
they trust online reviews as much as personal suggestions and recommendations and this accentuate
the soaring level of influence that influencers can have on their audience. In fact, from the same
report it turns out that 72% of the same consumers interviewed will take some actions after reading
a positive review of a product or service, as we can see in the graph below (Figure 2).
Figure 2: How do online customer reviews affect your opinion of a local business? Source: BrightLocal (2014)
Moreover, if we take into accounts these information and we look at the data of one of the social
media channels, Instagram, it is understandable why there is a lot of interest from brands in
The Influencer Marketing Factory

7
investing in it: “There are more than 400 million monthly active users on Instagram, 3.5 billion likes
daily and more than 80 million photos posted a day” (Instagram, 2016). Therefore, since customers
trust a business that has a positive review from another customer and Instagram is a social network
with million of monthly active users, brands are seizing this opportunity because of its business
potential.
But Instagram is not the only social media channel where brands are currently investing on. To
mention another example, companies are present also on Snapchat: the adoption of this social media
channel by brands grew by 50% between January and October 2016, as reported by Marketing Dive
(Kirkpatrick, 2017) - an online magazine that provides news and analysis for marketing executives,
covering topics such as social media marketing, marketing data and analytics.
To mention another channel, an interesting fact provided by Google (O’Neil-Hart & Blumenstein,
2016) is that 70% of teenage YouTube subscribers (13-19 years old) say they relate to YouTubers
more than traditional celebrities and this is mostly because of two reasons: the first one is that
television has less effect and impact on Generation Z (Ibid.) – also known as Post-Millennials, are
the people born in the range from the mid-1990s to early 2000s (Strauss & Howe, 1991) – , the
second reason is that teenagers see VIPs and celebrities as people too distant from their habits and
daily life, while they find their favourites YouTubers more similar to them and they perceive
Youtubers as they would be like friends (O’Neil-Hart & Blumenstein, 2016).
For instance, while the more traditional tv channel is less watched by the new generations
(MarketingCharts, 2017), young people watch a lot of online videos: Facebook, in 2016, announced
that 100-million hours of video were watched on a daily basis (Wagner, 2016) and Snapchat, during
the same year, hit 10-billion video views each day (Frier, 2016). Also YouTube, the social media for
video, in the early 2017 can count 1,300,000,000 users, with 300 hours of video uploaded every
minute (Donchev, 2017). “6 out of 10 people prefer online video platforms to live TV”, states
Google (O’Neil-Hart & Blumenstein, 2016). All in all, young people are moving from traditional
channels to social media ones which are showing an increasing growth rate every year in terms of
active users and brands are seizing this opportunity entering more and more within these channels
pursuing new business techniques in order to keep up with this new trend, continuing to make

8
profits and not become outdated. This means that the prevalence of online videos can shape the
future of the influencer marketing and the marketing itself.

Another factor that is bringing brands to invest in influencer marketing is that “social media changes
the relationship between companies and customers from master and servant, to peer to peer” as Jay
Baer an American marketing consultant, speaker, and the author of the New York Times bestselling
book, Youtility – stated on Convince & Convert (Baer, 2010), an award-winning magazine about
digital marketing. This quote means that social media allowed the creation of a new type of
relationship between brands and their customers from a traditional way of advertising, in which a
company is used to have a unilateral communication (if we think for example of an advertisement on
tv where the customers cannot leave any kind of feedback but only watch it) to a new bilateral type
of communication where brands advertise (for example through a promoted post on Facebook from
the official brand fan page) and customers can promptly express their feedbacks and point of view.

Moreover a report written by Fashion and Beauty Monitor & Econsultancy (2016) called The Rise Of
Influencers shows interesting facts and statistics collected from a survey sent to 348 practitioners. One
of the most important key insights of this report is that the context is crucial: in fact, 72% of
respondents say that “relevancy in relation to subject area is more important than influencer reach.
By contrast, just 30% think it’s more important to have an influencer with reach, than one who
relates specifically to the nature of the brand or campaign” (Ibid, p. 4).
In the same report (Ibid.) Anna-Marie Solowij, founder of BeautyMART – an online beauty retailer
– states that credibility is decisive and remarks how much is important that influencers not only have
a lot of followers but know what they are talking about, giving real value to their fans. Another
interesting statistic is that 57% of the respondents already have an influencer marketing strategy in
place and 21% do not have one yet but is planning to have it over the next 12 months. This data
provides us an overview of the high interest around the influencer marketing topic and its future
possibile growth in the next years. On the one hand, although there is interest in influencer
marketing, one of the biggest problem that emerges from the survey is that brands have difficulty in
identifying the right influencers that are a good fit for them and that this turns out to be complicated

9
and time consuming. This insight relates perfectly to this thesis’ problem area and the aim of this
thesis is to investigate how brands can better find the right influencer for an online influencer
marketing campaign.

All in all, based on the information provided above, the way companies and brands communicate to
consumers and advertise their products is changing. Television and traditional advertising techniques
are not effective anymore and the rise of influencer marketing and social media channels is shaping a
new way of advertising a product to consumers in a less aggressive and more targeted way.
2.0 Problem Area
“We have no idea what to pay them. That’s the problem.” confessed a social media executive,
answering to a question regarding how brands decide how much pay an influencer (Pathak, 2016).
Moreover, “It’s hard to track the effect that influencers have on a brand’s sales, and the cost of
employing influencers has risen drastically in recent years” highlights Willett (2016) regarding the
relationship between brands and influencers.
These mentioned above are only two examples of the challenges and uncertainties of practitioners
towards influencer marketing that has raised in the last 2 years. Reading these interviews it emerges
that unfortunately there are many more challenges, such as low control on pricing, pre-negotiated
contracts, the lack of rules and regulamentation or at least guidelines on influencer marketing.
Indeed, Influencer Marketing, although is a growing and appealing advertising practice, still needs to
be considered as a new trend in the Marketing world and, as such, it is missing not only an academic
background but also guidelines for all the players involved in the field.
Based on these preliminary information, If we suppose that a brand wants to find the right
influencer for its influencer marketing campaign, we can argue that it will not achieve this goal too
easily and it will have to face many unknown factors.
One example of preliminary challenge could be even identify the potential influencer: for instance,
currently the influencer marketing platforms that support companies and brands in the research –
and that I will explain in the next chapters in detail – provide only data on the influencers without
any explanation to brands of which of the many influencers they should choose. Practically speaking,

10
this type of data includes, if we take in consideration the social media channel Instagram, the
number of followers, the number of photos published, geolocation and influencer’s main topic.
Giving only numerical data to brands interested in finding an influencer without any useful insights
cannot help too much in terms of influencer identification, especially under a budgeting point of
view, a crucial factor for a company. In fact, having merely the number of followers of an influencer
is not enough to understand if she/he is the right one for the brand’s influencer marketing
campaign, as I will stress throughout this thesis, because data have to be combined and processed
together in order to give insights and useful information for the brand.

Another critical factor in any marketing campaign, not only in an influencer one, is to define the
correct amount of budget to allocate (Piercy, 1986). For instance, decisions around marketing budget
are crucial for a business and should be based on facts and data rather than intuitions (Fisher et al.,
2012). But, as stated previously, brands at the moment do not know how to allocate money for
influencer marketing, since they are budgeting more on intuitions and guessing than on a data-driven
perspective. A poor budgeting approach can sometimes totally ruin a business or at least can
negatively affect it in terms of revenues and growth (Ryckman, 2011). For example, at the moment
there are not tools that calculate how much a brand should pay a specific influencer per promoted
post, an important insight that can help the brand in better manage the yearly budget of the
marketing department. Said so, since marketing budgeting is a crucial process for brands and
momentarily companies are not approaching it correctly regarding influencer marketing campaigns,
it is fundamental to make a structure of it, creating a formula and a tool that can help brands in
better understanding a fair price to pay influencers and organize the yearly budget for influencer
marketing on a data-driven approach instead of a hypothesis-driven way.
2.1 Problem formulation

Based on the lack of knowledge that companies have towards the influencer field, as stated in the
problem area section, this thesis aims to analyze which are the most important factors that a brand
has to take into consideration before creating an influencer marketing campaign and also create a
tool, based on a formula, that will suggest the Instagrammers’ price per promoted post that brands

11
should pay for. Moreover, the ultimate goal of this thesis will be to create a guideline that will guide
brands in this process, optimizing the way of how to choose the right influencer for a successful
digital promotion activity.
Based on the information provided in the problem area chapter and at the beginning of the problem
formulation one, I defined the following main question:

How can a brand better identify the right influencer within the fashion industry in the US
for its influencer marketing campaign?

In other words the final aim of this thesis will be firstly to highlight the current challenges that
brands are facing within influencer marketing field, and secondly to provide them some specific
guidelines that will help them for their next influencer marketing campaigns.
2.1.1 Research questions

In order to be able to fully answer the main problem formulation of this thesis, I decided to create
two main sub-questions:

1) Which are currently the main challenges that brands face when looking for the right
influencer?

2) How can brands measure the monetary value of a promoted post done by an US
Instagrammer within the fashion industry?

The first sub-question, that will be answered through both a quantitative survey and qualitative
interviews done to influencer marketing practitioners, will help me in understanding the actual state
of influencer marketing, which are the biggest challenges that brands are facing, especially during the
research of influencers for a new influencer marketing campaign and how these challenges could be
solved.

12
For what concerns the second sub-question, which aims to understand how can brands measure the
monetary value of a promoted post done by an Instagrammer within the fashion industry, I decided
to personally scrape and gather data instead of only using data collected from others and published
on the Internet. Collecting my own data, I will be able to calculate an average engagement rate on
Instagram, taking in consideration only the fashion industry in the US. Knowing the average
engagement rate within a certain industry and a specific country, can help brands in having an
overview of this important factor during the process of searching and selecting the right influencer.
Moreover, I will use the average engagement rate as a variable in a formula I will create that will help
brands in calculating the monetary value for a promoted post by an US Instagrammer within the
fashion industry. In this way, brands can have a factor to take in consideration during the influencer
research in terms of budgeting.

All in all, these two sub-questions can help me in better identify the current challenges in the field
and better understand the right commercial agreement that should happen between brands and
influencers, filling the gap of knowledge that, as previously mentioned in the problem area, currently
companies have. Moreover, based on the analysis of these information, the final aim of this thesis
will be to help brands in better identify the right influencer for their influencer marketing campaign
on Instagram, providing some common rules and general guidelines that brands can take in
consideration when looking at which influencer to use for a campaign.
3.0 Practical State of Influencer Marketing
This chapter is meant to introduce and investigate deeper the actual practices in the influencer
marketing field. For instance, since this topic is new and not fully investigated yet, it is important to
define some key concepts and therefore enable the reader to understand them.
3.1 Influencer Marketing Players – Influencers, Agencies and Platforms
After reading several articles about influencer marketing, the first notion to mention is that in the
Influencer Marketing field there are mostly four players: influencer marketing agencies, influencer

13
marketing platforms, influencers and brands. These players, that I will present in the next chapters,
can use different channels and platforms to connect and promote products.
3.1.1 Types of Influencers

A fundamental point to mention is the distinction between macro-influencers and micro-influencers:
the first ones can be defined as “influencers who have a significant but not massive following as
compared to top influencers and celebrities. They aren’t your traditional celebrities but individuals
who are considered to be experts in their relevant niche” (Barker, 2016) and these niches can be, for
example, food blogging, fitness Instagrammer, mommy and travel bloggers. They usually have
between 10,000 and 150,000 followers on Instagram (Boyd, 2016) and their average engagement rate
is 2.4% (Smith, 2016). Is important to highlight that this average engagement rate just cited does not
take in consideration any difference between countries or type of industry. The engagement rate is a
concept that I will define and explain in the Engagement, Impressions and Reach chapter. It is the
result of the sum of the engagement (likes + comments) divided by the number of followers. The
average “engagement rate”, instead, is calculated on a selection of influencers (Influencer A has 3%,
Influencer B has 5%, Influencers C has 2.4% and so on) and then all the engagement rate
percentages are summed up and divided by the total number of influencers taken in consideration.
In order to understand the concept I have created a table (Figure 3) that shows an example:

Figure 3: 6 different influencers with their own engagement rate
Influencer A Influencer B Influencer C Influencer D Influencer E Influencer F
3% 5% 2.4% 1.3% 0.7% 7%

The average engagement rate will be:
.77%6
3 + 5 + 2.4 + 1.3 + 0.7 + 7
= 2

That being said, if a brand knows the average engagement rate of influencers in a certain country
and a specific market, it can use it as a factor that has to be taken in consideration during the search

14
of influencers for an influencer marketing campaign. If we suppose that the average engagement rate
of micro-influencers (10,000 - 150,000 followers) in the fashion industry in the US is 5% (this is only
hypothetical, I will later calculate the real average engagement rate), brands will mostly take in
consideration influencers that have an engagement rate around 5% and will possibly not start
relationships with influencers with less than that specific engagement rate percentage to get the best
from the marketing investment.
On the other hand, instead, there are the macro-influencers have between 500,000 and 1,000,000 or
more of subscribers or followers (Mathews, 2016); having more followers doesn’t mean directly get
more engagement: on the contrary, the average engagement rate for macro-influencers is 1.75%
(Adams, 2016). Also this average engagement rate, as already stated for the micro-influencers one, is
generic and does not take in consideration any difference between types of industry nor countries.
All the information cited are summarized in the Figure 4 below.

Figure 4: Type of influencers (metrics based on Instagrammers)
Type of influencer N. of followers Average engagement rate
Micro-influencer 1,000 - 150,000 2.4%
Medium-influencer 150,000 - 500,000 No data available online
Macro-influencer 500,000 - ≈ 1,000,000 1.75%
Celebrities 1,000,000+ No data available online

Macro-influencers and micro-influencers are not the only type of influencers on social media. Since
there are different promotional channels, there are also different types of influencers. It is vital that
brands comprehend the distinction between influencers, from the small ones (micro-influencers) to
the celebrities. Marketing departments should understand that a big number of followers does not
directly mean a successful influencer marketing campaign. In fact, what is also important, as
previously stated, is the engagement rate of the influencer, a factor that has to be calculated on a
specific influencer and then compared to the average engagement rate of other influencers within
the same industry and geolocation. This has to be done because it is important for a brand to find
influencers with an average or more than average engagement rate (compared to other influencers in

15
the same field and geolocation) in order to get a positive return on investment or at least more
interest in the promoted product. In fact, if a user engages with a promoted content of an influencer
means that he or her is interested in it and this action would possibly bring to a purchasing of the
product promoted. Instead, a low engagement rate on an Instagram photo could mean that the
followers are not interested in the promoted content and possibly would not be interested nor buy
the product. All in all, it is important to stress that if a brand knows the engagement rate of an
influencer, it can be used as a key factor during the influencer research and selection.
In other words, this division and explanation of different types of influencers is important for
brands when they are looking for the right influencer before start a marketing campaign for two
reasons. First of all, to know if that person is the right one that can spread the message of the brand
(such as a promotion or sponsored content) and, secondly, how the brand can adapt its message
with the influencer’s contents and style. Context is important and have to be taken in consideration
when a brand is looking for an influencer. In fact, suppose that an influencer – a professional
videogamer, for example – one day shows to his/her followers a content that promotes a perfume:
this would appear not aligned with the existing Instagrammer’s contents and would affect not only
the engagement rate of the influencer but also his/her credibility to the followers, since trust, as
stated previously, is an important factor in influencer marketing. Not only the content but also the
style is fundamental: if an Instagrammer is used to publish only black & white photos and his/her
followers like them because of that color choice, if suddenly the influencer publishes a colorful
promoted content in collaboration with a brand, the followers could find that choice too staged and
not spontaneous and stop following the influencer.
3.1.2 Influencer Marketing Platform and Agencies
Currently, there are influencer marketing agencies that connect influencers and brands. For example,
IMAgency, an influencer marketing agency, operates as a middle-person between brand and
influencer and offers to brands also specific expertises like brand activation (that includes activities
such as community contests, in-store events and fashion weeks), brand ambassador management
(which means educate the influencers in better communicate the brand’s message), but also content
creation and influencer marketing strategy. This means that agencies not only connect influencers

16
and brands, but also offer services in terms of creativity and marketing analysis. By offering
creativity advices and ideas, agencies can help both the brand and the influencer in creating a more
effective marketing campaign, analyzing the latest market trends and the best ways to, for example,
shoot a picture or edit a video. Agencies can also support the creation of the advertisement’s
concept, setting up the content, the wording and the style of a picture, blog post or video, in order
to better match the brand identity and influencer style, giving to the promoted post a more realistic
approach and thus avoiding a too staged advertisement that is usually not liked by the followers and
customers.
But these agencies are not the only player in the influencer market. Influencer marketing platforms,
which are SaaS (Software as a Service) – which means that they are web application with a monthly
fee payment for the usage (Rouse, 2016) – provide specific tools in order to find the best influencers
by category, location, hashtags, keywords, number of followers and other factors. Hypr, for example,
is an influencer marketing platform that has a big database of influencers profiles across the most
important social media channels and gives the opportunity to any brand to access its database and
filter the influencers depending on the brand target and influencer marketing campaign’s goals.
Explaining in a practical way how these platforms are currently used, it is important to remember
that brands main goals are focused on increasing their sales, brand awareness and their paid reach. In
order to do so, they pay agencies to get in contact with influencers in their field and start a
partnership. Influencer marketing agencies use influencer marketing platforms in order to filter and
find the right influencers on the social media channels and get them under their wing. But brands
can also find influencers by themselves without using any platforms or paying any agencies. This is a
business choice by the company depending on management decisions and on the yearly marketing
budget. All these process and relationships are graphically explained in the Figure 5 below I created.

17
Figure 5: the relationship between Influencer Marketing Agencies, Platforms, Influencers and Brands.

3.2 Influencer Marketing Channels
Influencers can decide to use different social media channels based on their expertise and industry.
For example, if we take into consideration the fashion and beauty industries, Instagram is the most
influential social platform where influencers can promote brand products (Desreumaux, 2015).
Econsultancy, a global team of experts that offers to companies services like marketing strategy and
planning – in association with Fashion and Beauty Monitor – made a report called Voice of the
Influencer (Gilliland, 2016) in which outlines the social media channels where influencers focus their
communication and what is the reason behind it. From the report shown in the Figure 6 below, it is
possible to see the different channels ranked from highest to lowest exposure in terms of influence:
Instagram (74%), Twitter (51%), Blog (45%), Facebook (25%), Snapchat (17%), YouTube (16%),
Pinterest (13%), Tumblr (4%).

18
Figure 6: What platform are influencers most influential on? Source: Gilliland (2016

3.3 Engagement, impressions and reach
If we investigate deeper the topic of online advertising, a poll taken by Infolinks – an advertising
platform that offers ad solutions for both publishers and advertisers – shows that 50% of internet
users never clicked an online advertisement (such as banner or video ads before a YouTube content)
while 35% of internet users clicked on it less than 5 ads in a month (Adotas, 2013). If we relate these
information to online advertising metrics, it is important to remember what Kristy Sammis,
co-founder of CLEVER – an influencer marketing agency and TEDx speaker – stated during an
episode of the podcast Half Our Intern in March 2016: “Engagement is the new impressions. It
matters as much, if not more, than someone’s reach” (Blake, 2016). In order to understand this
sentence, it is important to define all the three concepts cited in it: engagement, impressions and
reach. “Impression” is a term used in online advertising when advertisers “paid flat fees to show
their ads a fixed number of times – typically, 1,000 showings or impression” (Edelman et al., 2005,
p. 245); to make it clear, if an advertiser allocates $ 50.00 in online advertising on an
impression-based campaign that cost $ 1.00 every 1,000 impressions, the advertiser will be able to
show an adv, for example a banner, 50,000 times. This type of advertising doesn’t take in
consideration the number of clicks but only the number of impressions, which means how many

19
times the advertisement has been shown to the users. The same person could see the same
advertisement more than one time and this means that, for example, 50,000 impressions would not
necessarily mean that 50,000 different people that the advertisement. To continue with this example,
if we suppose that an advertiser allocates $ 50.00 on a $1 CPM (Cost Per Mille Impressions) online
campaign where a customer sees the advertisement twice, the impressions will be 50,000 ( 1 : 1,000
= 50 : 50,000 ) but the people that actually saw the advertisement will be 25,000 (50,000 / 2).
Instead, the term reach is “the number of unique people who received impressions of a page post,
which means that If the same person sees the same content two different times, the reach would
remain at one.” (Nadeau, 2015). This means that the reach of the same advertising campaign
previously used as an example will be 25,000 people. To better explain the concepts I created a table
(Figure 7) that shows a couple of examples.

Figure 7: 2 examples to show the difference between impressions and reach
Budget CPM
(Cost Per Mille)
Frequency (how
many times the
adv is seen by the
same person)
Impressions Reach
$ 50,00 $ 1.00 2 50,000 25,000
$ 120,00 $ 3.00 1 40,000 40,000

The last term, “engagement” is “when someone cares and interacts” (Sterne, 2010, p.106) with a
product, a brand or a person. Online engagement is when someone interacts doing certain actions,
for example commenting on a blog or subscribing to its rss feed, replying to a tweet of another user
on Twitter, leaving a review on a product on Amazon or liking a picture on Instagram. These are
just few examples of online engagement shown on the “Relevant metrics for social media
applications organized by key social media objectives table” on MIT Sloan Management Review
(Hoffman & Fodor, 2010). If we take in consideration the social media Instagram, engagement can
be defined as the sum of likes and comments on a photo, because these are the only engagement
actions that an user can do on this specific social media. Once calculated the engagement, it is
possible to calculate the engagement rate, an important factor that brands should take in

20
consideration when they plan an online marketing campaign and that I have already mentioned in
chapter 3.1.1. Brands should think about the engagement rate because is a number, expressed as
percentage, that can be used as a factor to understand if the contents (pictures, videos, status) of a
certain influencer are interesting to his/her followers or not. An influencer with a high number of
followers but a low engagement rate could bring less interest to the brand product and few sales
compared to an influencer with less followers but an higher engagement rate.
To show the concept in practice, the engagement rate formula (Batum & Ersoy, 2016) can be
written as:
) 100 ( number of fans
Total number of engagement to a single post

In my case, since I focus on Instagram, the Engagement Rate formula has to take in consideration
also the number of photos of an user. Instead of using all the photos of an Instagrammer, based on
my previous experience on this topic I suggest to choose a number between 10 and 30. I decided to
define also the number of photos to get the same snapshot among influencers. In fact, if I analyze
for two times the engagement rate of the same Instagrammer taking in consideration the first time
10 photos and the second time 1000 photos, the engagement percentage would be different and the
same would be if I calculate it among different influencers. For this reason, since I will use the
engagement rate formula to gather the average engagement rate within fashion Instagrammer in the
U.S. I decided to insert also the number of photos as a variable to use in the formula. After adding
the number of photos variable, the formula can be written as:
) 100 ( number of followers
Number of photos
Total number of likes + total number of comments)

To make this clear to the reader, I will provide a practical example. I took my Instagram account
summing up the engagement of my last three photos – I started only with three instead of ten to see
how much time it would have required to finish the task – and this is the calculation:

21
) 100 .53% ( 5364
)3
1319 + 55
= 8
1,319 is the sum of the total number of likes I received on my last three Instagram photos; while 55
is the sum of all the comments I got on the last three pictures. 5,346 is the number of my total
followers. Using the formula, it is easy to see that my Instagram Engagement Rate is 8.53% and this
information can be used as a factor during the process of influencer research and selection. In fact, if
an Instagrammer has a lot of followers, for example 100,000 but only 0.5% of Engagement Rate, is
plausible that his or her followers are not really interested in what she/he is publishing and a brand
could not get enough return on investment or interest on the product it wants to promote on the
influencer’s account.
4.0 Methodology
The purpose of this chapter is to present considerations in terms of methodology regarding the
modality and techniques used for data collection during the research process. Moreover, also the
choice of philosophy of science will be introduced.
Regarding the data collection, both qualitative and quantitative approaches have been applied in
order to present a deeper and more complete overview of the problem researched.
I will also state the reason why I chose a mixed methods approach, providing strengths and
weaknesses of it, discussing its limitations and delimitations. Finally, this thesis reliability and validity
will be also presented and discussed.
4.1 Philosophy of Science
This section is meant to present an overview of the epistemological and ontological philosophies in
order to understand how knowledge was sought in this thesis. Moreover, this section of the thesis is
meant to define which philosophical approaches have been used, in particular the positivistic one
and the interpretivism one, and it will argue why these chosen methods are applied throughout the
all data collection process and methodological stances. For what concerns the relationship between

22
ontology and epistemology, Hay (2006) states that “ontology logically precedes epistemology ... we
cannot know what we are capable of knowing (epistemology) until such time as we have settled on
(a set of assumptions about) the nature of the context in which that knowledge must be acquired
(ontology)” (p. 8). Said so, Philosophy of Science is important because it is responsible not only for
checking specific scientific methodologies, but also to support them. In short, “it makes us think
about what we are doing and why” (Machamer, 1998, p.1).
4.1.1 Ontology
“Objectivist ontology sees social phenomena and their meanings as existing independently of social
actions, whereas constructivist ontology infers that social phenomena are produced through social
interaction and are therefore in a constant state of revision” (Bryman and Bell, 2003, p.19). Another
ontological question that Bryman brings to attention is to understand if social entities can be viewed
as objective ones, having reality to social actors (objectivism) or if they can be considered “social
constructions built up from the perceptions and actions of social factors” (ibid).
If we take in consideration the positivistic paradigm of ontology, positivists consider the researcher
and the object (the phenomena to investigate) as two distinctive things, while interpretivists believe
that reality and the observer cannot be separated.
I personally believe that the world in general has both subjective and objective characteristics, and
therefore my thesis reflects both the positivistic and the interpretivist ontology.

4.1.2 Epistemology

Epistemology takes into consideration a perception of the world and phenomena around us. It
clearly states what can be considered as an acceptable knowledge within a particular discipline,
concerning the questions regarding availability and obtainability of the knowledge (Bryman, 2008, p.
13). Again there are two main distinctions: firstly, positivistic approach claims that it is possible to
acquire knowledge about the world unmediated and with no interferences. Secondly, observation
within interpretative approach is never objective but always affected by the social constructions of
reality.

23

If we start defining what positivism is, the positivist philosophy of science believes that the world is
external (Carson et al., 1988) and that “there is a single objective reality to any research phenomenon
or situation regardless of the researcher’s perspective or belief” (Hudson and Ozanne, 1988).
Moreover, in positivism studies, “the role of the researcher is limited to data collection and
interpretation through objective approach and the research findings are usually observable and
quantifiable” (Dudovskiy, 2012). Usually, in a positivistic study, the data collection and the preferred
research methods are on a quantitative nature, such as surveys, questionnaires or official statistics
(Ibid.). The reason behind the choice of using quantitative methods is that in this way the researcher
can seek more objective and detached results to the phenomenon he or she is investigating.
Relating these statements to my thesis, I can argue that the positivistic approach has been used and
followed: for instance, starting from the decision of which data collection method to use, for this
thesis the gathering of primary data was done through a survey and quantitative method such as data
scraping.
Other two key fundamental concepts of the positivism, are that the research must progress through
hypotheses and the main concepts need to be operationalized so that they can be measured (Ibid).
Also both of these statements can relate and fit my thesis, since I am not only creating hypotheses
on which challenges influencer marketing might face and the reasons why this practice is at risk, but
also I am converting these concepts into metrics, a tool and a formula in order to have measurable
results and conclusions.

As a second epistemological consideration I applied the interpretivist approach which allows to
ensure an adequate understanding and meaning by implying the idea of interpretation of the reality
by every subject. Thus, multiple realities exist because of the different individual and group
perspectives (Ibid.). In other words interpretivists recognize that the knowledge they build reflects
their particular goals, culture, experience and history. I think interpretivism is a good choice of
philosophy because I am involved in the topic of influencer marketing, since I am working within
this field and also because the knowledge I am trying to create thanks to this thesis reflects my
personal goals. Moreover, interpretive approaches rely heavily on naturalistic methods, such as

24
interviewing (Schutz, A., 1962). This can be related to my thesis, since the two semi-structured
interviews I conducted relate to a more qualitative approach. The reason behind using also the
qualitative approach and therefore combining quantitative and qualitative into a mixed method
methodology, is that I wanted to gather as many information as possible on the influencer marketing
topic, and the easier and more comprehensive way to do so, was by interviewing experts in the field
and interpret their feedbacks and answers.

All in all, I decided to use both positivism and interpretivism in my thesis since I believe that
through positivistic approach I can establish one objective truth and present generalizations on the
influencer marketing topic, but also that by using the interpretivist approach, I can interpret
individual experiences and create a generalization based on the interpretation of personal
experiences.
4.2 Abduction
Abductive reasoning was introduced by Charles Sanders Peirce (Yu, 1994) to denote a type of
non-deductive inference that was different from the already familiar inductive type (Ibid). Acquiring
knowledge from abduction is a way of reasoning that focuses on the search of explanatory
hypotheses. According to Peirce, abductive reasoning is the only logical operation which introduces
any new idea (Hookway, 2016). Abduction is one of the three possible reasoning within a study: the
other two options are induction and deduction. Again Pierce differentiates the three saying that
“abduction is the firstness (existence, actuality); deduction, the secondness (possibility, potentiality);
and induction, the thirdness (generality, continuity)” (Yu, 1994, p. 15).
The distinction between induction and deduction becomes very problematic when it comes to the
actual research process. Croswell claims that the process of moving between theory and data never
operates in only one direction (Creswell et al., 2011). However, during the actual design, collection,
and analysis of data it is impossible to operate in either an exclusively theory - or data-driven way
(Ibid). Therefore, abductive reasoning seems highly relevant since it moves back and forth between
induction and deduction: first converting observations into theories and then assessing those
theories through action. This particular version of the abductive process is quite familiar to

25
researchers who combine qualitative and quantitative methods in sequential fashion (Ivankova et al.,
2006; Morgan, 2007), where the inductive results from a qualitative approach can serve as inputs for
the deductive goals of a quantitative approach, and vice versa.

All the considerations and definitions mentioned above relate and confirm that abduction could be
seen as the right reasoning for this thesis. For instance, I am moving back and forth between
converting observations from influencer marketing experts into a tool and formula and then I am
again assessing the value of this formula through an actual application of it. Moreover, the abductive
reasoning accepts both quantitative and qualitative data collection methods which I am both
applying.
4.3 Literature review methodology
Even though Influencer Marketing can be seen as a new topic in the academic field, there are
however interesting papers about it.
In order to create new knowledge I had to be aware of the existing researches written by others and
literature review is a crucial step in the process of understanding a certain topic, both for funding the
basics in identification of weaknesses and also for enabling problematization on a specific domain
(Green et al. 2006; Hart, 1998, Khoo et al, 2011 in Boell & Cecez-Kecmanovic, 2014).
For this reason, I decided to follow the hermeneutic framework for the literature review process
explained by Boell & Cecez-Kecmanovic (2014). This framework is the combination of two
hermeneutic circles: the search and acquisition circle and the analysis and interpretation circle that are both
connected in a mutual way.
The search and acquisition circle is composed of seven phases in a loop: searching, sorting, selecting,
acquiring, reading, identifying, refining (Ibid.) as visible in Figure 8.

26
Figure 8: a hermeneutic framework for the literature review process consisting of two major hermeneutic circles - Source: Boell &
Cecez-Kecmanovic (2014, p. 264)

Following this framework, I started the searching phase with the aim of identifying relevant
publications: I looked for keywords related to influencer marketing on online libraries, university
libraries and databases of scholarly literature.
First of all, in order to have an overview of the influencer marketing concept I started searching
articles, papers and thesis on Google Scholar, an online database powered by Google that allows
everyone to search for resources looking for keywords. After a first search with the term influencer
marketing, I decided to limit the search to “influencer marketing” using the quotation marks: this
means that instead of looking for both the keywords “influencer” and “marketing” in the text, the
system returns only the resources that have the term “influencer” followed by “marketing” with the
intent to get only the papers that focus on that specific topic. In fact, looking for influencer
marketing without quotation marks returned me also more generic marketing topics I was not

27
interested in. Moreover, after a previous Google search on influencer marketing, I discovered that
the same topic is also called “influence marketing”. Knowing this, I decided then to look for both
the terms on Google Scholar and I used the search operators to do this. Search operators are search
parameters used in search engines to narrow down the focus of a search (Rouse, 2014). In my case I
used “AND”, “OR”, and “NOT”. The first search operator, if used, narrows down the research for
resources that have inside a keyword A and also a keyword B and it is mandatory that the keywords
B is present. The second one, “OR”, instead, tells to the search engine to look for keyword A or
keyword B and returns all the results that have inside the text both of the keywords. The last term
operator is “NOT” and is used to exclude a certain keyword.
To make this clear, I present here an example of one of the first searches I did on Google Scholar:
"influencer marketing" OR "influence marketing" AND "theoretical framework" that means I wanted to look
for both the terms “influencer marketing” and “influence marketing” but both of them had also to
include the term “theoretical framework” in their texts. Doing so, I was able to narrow my research
from more than 3,000 results to 450 texts more related to my research.
I also used the advanced search feature that is built into Google Scholar in order to look for certain
keywords only in the title and in a specific date range. To look for a term present only in the title of
the paper I firstly used the command “allintitle:” followed by the term I was interested in. An
example can be “allintitle: influencer marketing” and Google Scholar returned me 34 results.
Secondly I limited the date range of publication between 2010 and 2016 in order to get the most
updated possible resources and I got 22 results.
I used Google Scholar also because next to every results is shown the number of times that a paper
has been cited from other people and this can give an additional signal of the most important
reviews to take in consideration during the literature review.
After a first search on Google Scholar, I did the same search also on Scopus, an abstract and citation
database of scientific journals and books. Scopus is accessible only from certain IPs (Internet
Protocol Address) and for this reason I had to connect my computer to the KU (København
Universitet) Wifi in order to obtain an IP present on Scopus list and access to the database. Scopus
allowed me to find more papers on the topic that I wasn’t able to find on Google Scholar. In order
to narrow down my search, I did not used only logical operators, as I did on Google Scholar, but

28
also the so called field codes that help the user in better identify certain keywords within field of the 3
documents. For example, I used TITLE-ABS-KEY(influencer marketing) that returns papers where
the terms between brackets – in this example the keyword “influencer marketing” – appears in the
title, keywords, or abstract. This type of advanced search helped me in getting more related
documents than a basic search would have given me.
After a first search on the digital libraries previously cited, I sorted the documents by number of
citations, to identify the most important papers about the topic I was interested in and publication
date, to have the most updated papers on the matter, since it is a new topic. I then started selecting
which were the most important and related documents for me in order to start acquiring them.
Sometimes I was able to download on my computer the pdf file directly from Google Scholar, other
times I could not download them for copyright reasons but I was able to read them through online
documents preview tools. When the digital library did not show any download buttons for a
document, I searched it on Google looking for the name of the document in quotation marks and
followed by “filetype:pdf” in order to find only PDF files and download them. I then moved to the
next phase, that is the reading of the documents selected in order to identify the documents to use
and also find new search terms and additional publications or authors and widen my knowledge
about the field and its related topics. Finally, I refined the search using a search strategy in order to
improve my research called citation pearl growing strategy. This strategy “uses characteristics of
relevant articles as a starting point for searching other relevant articles. In addition to using citation
analysis, this method uses keywords assigned to documents” (Boell & Cecez-Kecmanovic, 2014, p.
281).
4.4 Data collection
In order to answer the problem formulation and the related research questions, both qualitative and
quantitative research were applied for the data collection process of this thesis. In detail, a survey
and two interviews have been used: the survey provided me a statistical acknowledgement around
the influencer marketing main challenges from the brands and companies perspectives, while the
3

http://help.elsevier.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/2347/p/8150/session/L2F2LzEvdGltZS8xNDkwNTI4MzMwL3N
pZC9BVUNqRnZlbg%3D%3D

29
semi-structured interviews delivered a qualitative overview of the main factors that brands analyze in
the process of choosing the right influencer for a campaign and the challenges this practice currently
has.
Both survey and interviews will help me in answering the first and research questions and also the
main problem formulation of this thesis.
4.5 Mixed methods approach
This section aims to explain what the mixed methods approach is, its main benefits and how it will
be applied in this thesis. For instance, as I will argue, I believe that the mixed method approach is
the most applicable method to understand a combination of quantitative and qualitative data.
Bryman (2006) described it as a research that integrates together qualitative and quantitative research
within the same project. Also Creswell (2013) defined the mixed methods approach as a technique
for collecting, analyzing and combining both quantitative and qualitative methods in a specific study
to comprehend a research problem. The biggest benefit of this method is to remove any implicit
weaknesses of both quantitative and qualitative methods.
In my case, on the one hand quantitative research avoids the lacks of the qualitative approach, giving
me not biased data, on the other hand qualitative research will allow me to analyze the problem
formulation deeper and with more detail.
4.6 Qualitative research
Qualitative research can be defined as any type of research that gives outcomes and findings not
using any statistical procedures or other methods and techniques in terms of quantification (Corbin
& Strauss, 2008).
Bryman (2008) states that the core characteristic of this type of research is to acquire information in
a free form with the scope of understanding, explaining and interpreting of empirical data. Indeed,
qualitative research often provide answers to questions that start with “why” and “how”. The main
benefit of using the qualitative research method is the detailed level of comprehension and
understanding of the research problem analyzing and interpreting the collected data gained through

30
the qualitative research (Ibid, p. 367). Within the qualitative research technique in the sociological
studies, the most common used methods are interviews (Creswell, 2008). Interviews have been
categorized in many ways but the most common are: unstructured, semi-structured and structured
interviews (Longhurst, 2003). In my thesis, I chose the semi-structured interview: these type of
interviews are organized around a prearranged number of questions that can change during the
interview when new questions emerge between the interviewee and the interviewer. In this thesis,
the interviews will be conducted with two practitioners in the influencer marketing field in order to
collect general information within this marketing area and also more specific insights on actual issues
and challenges in the next months. The first expert interviewed works as a Marketing Strategist at
WowCrazy, a crowdfunding fashion platform that in the last months created an influencer marketing
forecast agency called Call The Tune, which helps brands in saving time and investing wisely their
marketing budget allocated for influencer marketing campaigns. The second expert is the Founder
of Influencer Marketing Hub, the leading industry resource for Micro-Influencers, brands, agencies
and platform that every week publishes posts influencer marketing best practices. Both the
interviews lasted approximately 35 minutes and I interviewed the first expert on Skype, since he is
located in another country, while the second expert was interviewed in person. These qualitative data
will be essential in supporting the conclusions, answering the first research sub-question in this
thesis and contributing to my problem formulation answer.
4.6.1 Interviews
An interview is a “conversation between people in which one person has the role of the researcher”
(Arksey and Knight 1999, p. 2) and, as previously stated, it can be unstructured, semi-structured or
structured.
The reason why I chose to use semi-structured interviews is because it allows new ideas to come up
during the interview between interviewer and interviewee: the interviewer should remain flexible
during the interview process so that the order of the questions can change during the conversation
and the content itself can develop on a different path and the interviewer can get more in-depth
answers. (Ibid.)

31
The data collected through an interview is usually recorded and transcribed later in order to analyze
the text from a qualitative point of view (Gill et al., 2008). Generally, when a researcher uses
interviews as a methodology, the sample size is small because of the amount of data to collect and
the time that it takes to schedule the interview, its duration, the transcription time and the analysis.

The questions asked during the two interviews were:

1. Based on articles and forums online, Instagram seems to be the best channels for Influencer
Marketing. Do you agree? If so, why?
2. Why macro-influencers have a lower engagement rate compared to micro-influencers?
3. How much is important the context in influencer marketing?
4. Which are the two biggest issues you think influencer marketing has at the moment?
5. Which are the two biggest challenges that influencer marketing will have in the next year?

I asked the first question in order to understand if Instagram is the best social network for influencer
marketing not only in terms of users numbers but also to have a qualitative explanation of the
phenomenon and confirm my choice of focusing only on Instagram for this thesis; for instance, the
purpose of this question was to validate the many reports cited in this thesis that confirm Instagram
as one of the most used channels by influencers within the fashion industry. The second question
can give me an overview of the reasons why micro-influencers and macro-influencers have different
engagement rates, helping me in understanding the monetary value per promoted post. In fact,
engagement rate and number of followers are factors to take in consideration when analyzing how
much brands should pay an Instagrammer for a promoted post. The third question was meant to
analyze not only numerical and quantitative factors but also to have insights on qualitative data such
as the importance of context in a influencer marketing campaign that can be, for example, a product
placement of a brand in an Instagrammer’s picture. Knowing if also context is important, can be
used as another guideline factor for brands to take in consideration during the process of influencer
identification, and, as I stated in the problem area, this is one of the most crucial factor to consider
when looking for an influencer.

32
The last two questions are meant to understand the actual situation of brands and influencer
marketing and how these experts see this practice’s development in the next future. In this way I will
be able to narrow down the main issues practitioners within this field are facing and this will be
taken into consideration when investigating what this thesis can add as valuable resource in order to
solve those challenges.
4.7 Quantitative research
The quantitative research design is described as “entailing the collection of numerical data and as
exhibiting a view of the relationship between theory and research” (Bryman, Bell, 2007, p. 160). This
type of research is very structured and follows very clear and systematic steps: as a first step, the
researcher structures the problem area in order to investigate a phenomenon; this step is then
followed by the data gathering to answer the problem area previously formed. Then, once the data
collection is over, the researcher start analyzing the collected data in order to make conclusions in
terms of statistical insights (Trochim, 2002). On the one hand, a benefit of this type of research is
that it provides numbers to investigate. On the other hand, a disadvantage of this approach is that
the researcher needs a relevant sample in order to have an outcome as more statistically solid and
accurate as possible. I decided to use the quantitative research method in order to better understand
the main actual situation from practitioners within influencer marketing field and which are their
challenges for the next months. For this reason I created a survey that is addressed to influencer
marketing platforms and agencies in order to gather information about actual challenges and
predictions for the next 12 months around the future of influencer marketing.
4.7.1 Survey
As previously mentioned, I decided to create a survey in order to gather quantitative data about the
actual situation and challenges around influencer marketing from platforms and agencies in the
influencer marketing industry. This approach allows me to collect data faster than interviewing
people one by one, helping me answer – in addition to the interviews – my first research question.
Regarding the survey, I decided to create the first two questions in a semi-closed format, because it
“offers the subject a limited number of choices and the freedom to include additional information”

33
(Del Greco & Walop, 1987, p.584). Regarding question number 2, I decided to give the respondents
the opportunity to mark two options, using a multiple choice format:; in this way, I believed I could
get a more comprehensive overview of the main challenges they think influencer marketing players
are facing. Instead for questions n.3, n.4 and n.5 of the survey I applied a close questions format that
offers only a limited number of choices (Ibid).

In order to create a survey for my quantitative research, I used TypeForm, a freemium platform that
allows everyone to easily create an online questionnaire, styling it and sharing it via a customized url.
The survey I created does not influence in any way the respondents, since no one can see the others’
answers and it is also comfortable towards the survey’s participants because they are able to
complete the questionnaire at their own preferred time. This type of questionnaire strengthen
privacy and decreases social concerns of the respondents that may have had if this survey was done
in person. An online survey is also faster, low cost and there are proofs that web questionnaires are
completed with less unanswered questions than non-online surveys (Bell, Bryman, 2015).
The survey has been sent by email and all the email addresses have been scraped using specific tools.
I have used both Email Hunter and Anymail finder in order to find founders, CEOs (Chief 4 5
Executive Office) and CMOs (Chief Marketing Officer) within the influencer marketing platforms
and agencies environment in the US. I have chosen founders, CEOs and CMOs because they are the
highest positions of a company with daily management challenges and they have an overview not
only of their own company but also of what is happening in the influencer marketing field. I have
intentionally omitted CTOs (Chief Technical Officer) since my survey focuses on marketing and not
on technical questions. I sent a total of 97 emails because 97 is the number of email addresses that I
was able to find using the tools previously cited.
The first tool – Email Hunter – is a Google Chrome extension that automatically finds in the
internet the email of a certain user when you visit his or her Linkedin profile; the second tool –
Anymail Finder – is a platform in which the searcher has to insert name, surname and company
domain (e.g. imagency.com) of a specific user and the tool will look for possible email addresses in
the internet that could match with the real one.
4
https://hunter.io
5
https://anymailfinder.com

34
Using a web survey such as TypeForm,data can be collected quickly and downloaded in a CSV
(comma separated value) file easily readable with software like Microsoft Office , OpenOffice or 6 7
even Google Spreadsheet . 8

Here below there are the survey questions and possible answers I implemented in the survey:

1) Which channels do brands prefer to use when developing influencer marketing campaigns
within the fashion industry?
a) Instragram, b) Twitter, c) Facebook, d) Blog, e) Linkedin, f) YouTube, g) Snapchat,
h) Other, specify
2) Which are the main issues that brands, in your experience as a platform or an agency, are
now facing?
a) Monetary issue: low budget from the brands for influencer marketing campaigns or
too high prices requested from the influencers, b) Measurement: difficulty in
measure the effectiveness of a campaign, c) Identification of influencers: brands still
struggle in finding the right influencers by their own, d) Legal: manage monetary
rewards and legal aspects with influencers, e) Other, specify
3) How much of brands' overall marketing budget is usually designated to influencer
marketing?
a) Less than 10%, b) 10-30%, c) 30-40%, d) 40-50%, e) 50-70%, f) more than 70%
4) Do the brands usually think that the price per post requested by an influencer is too high?
a) Yes, a lot of times, b) Often, c) Sometimes, d) Never happened
5) How much more a brand would be willing to pay for an influencer if his/her engagement
rate was higher?
a) The same as influencers with a low engagement rate, b) 1,5X, c) 2X, d) More than
2X
6
https://products.office.com/en-us/home
7
https://www.openoffice.org
8
https://spreadsheets.google.com

35
4.7.2 Data scraping

Data scraping “can be broadly defined as a data collection technique where a computer program
extracts and reposts data from a user output” states Hirschey (2014).
It is fundamental to say that the data scraping process I used helped me a lot in gathering the data
needed for the purposes of this thesis and that, if instead it would had been done manually, it would
had taken weeks of work. Instead, using the mentioned data scraper, I was able to gather the same
data in few minutes. I used a data scraper to gather data such as engagement rate of single
influencers and the average engagement rate of 1,500 Instagrammers within the fashion industry in
the US, which were the data needed to implement in my formula. The formula created in this thesis
- and that I will explain in detail in the data scraper creation paragraph - was meant to calculate the
monetary value of an Instagrammer’s promoted post.
In more details, in order to calculate the average engagement rate of American Instagrammers within
the fashion industry, I had to gather the engagement rate of all the Instagrammers in this field
(within a followers range between 10,000 and 1,500,000 in order to leave out non influencers – less
than 10,000 – and celebrities –more than 1,500,000). For instance, the Instagram engagement rate of
a specific Instagrammer, as previously stated under the “engagement, impressions and reach”
chapter, is a percentage calculated dividing the total of engagement (likes and comments) by a
certain number of photos and divided again by the total number of followers of the influencer. The
average engagement rate, instead, is the average of all a set of engagement rates within the same
social network or the same industry that gives and indication to influencers and brands on a factor
to look at before starting a work relationship between them.
To give the reader a deeper understanding of what is the practice of data scraping, this type of data
collection extracts data from the HyperText Markup Language (“HTML”) of a page (or multipages)
that a website displays (Lindenberg, 2012). Data scraping allows a programmer to seek and collect
data faster, because once created the scraper – a tool that can be coded in different programming
languages (e.g. PHP, R, Python, Java, Javascript) – it will run working in background, gathering the
data sometimes in few minutes, which is way less than hours that could take if the same work was
done manually. The main advantages of this method are: a fast data collection on hundreds or

36
thousands of data spread over several pages and the possibility to download the data in raw files as
CSV (comma separated value) or JSON (JavaScript Object Notation). On the other hand, the main
issue when applying a data scraping technique is that if a targeted website changes its HTML code,
the scraper will not be able anymore to scrape certain data and the programmer will have to
manually edit the source code in order to fix it.

Even if there are already data regarding the average engagement rate on Instagram on the internet, I
preferred to scrape and collect data, selecting only Instagrammer within the fashion industry and
located in the US in order to obtain primary data, that are data gathered for a specific research
problem and, for this reason, they totally fit with the purpose of this thesis, primary data are
opposite to secondary data, which are the ones already existing and that can be found on specialized
databases (Hox & Boeije, 2005). Two key benefits of primary data are that the data collection will be
specific to the researcher's need and the researcher will control the quality of it (My Market Research
Methods, 2011).

I downloaded Instagrammers’ information in a CSV file from Scrunch, an influencer marketing
platform that allows everyone to filter influencers based on variables such as country, follower
number range, posting frequency and industry and I imported them into my scraper.

In this thesis, the process of data collection and calculation has been the following:
1. Create the web scraper
2. Run the scrape on a list of 1500 Instagrammers within the fashion industry in US
3. Export a CSV file with all the engagement rates and number of followers for all the 1500
Instagrammers
4. Import the CSV file into Google Spreadsheet
5. Create a scattered graph from the data into the CSV file

To better explain all the data collection process flow, I created a graphic (Figure 9) to show it.

37
Figure 9: How the data scraping collection flow works

4.8 Data analysis
Once the data were collected through the semi-structured interviews, the survey and the data
gathered through the scraper, I proceeded analyzing the data and start answering the research
questions. For what concerns the survey, I used a statistical approach in order to align all the
answers and get a numerical result out of it. In regards to the semi-structured interviews, I compared
the answers to find similar replies among the interviewees whereby possible and get an overview of
subjective practitioner's’ point of views and beliefs. For what concerns the data scraping, I scraped
information such as number of likes, comments and followers from 1500 Instagrammers within the
fashion industry in US, which enabled me to both analyze singular profiles of Instagrammers and
also the average engagement rate of Instagrammers with a number of followers range between
10,000 and 1,000,000+. Knowing these data, I was able to use them to calculate the price for an
Instagrammer’s promoted post that a brand should pay for.

38
4.9 Reliability and validity
Reliability and validity are both fundamental quality criteria concepts of what is scientifically
accepted as proof by scientists (Bryman & Bell, 2015).
For instance, reliability and validity are two basic properties of empirical measurement (Carmines &
Zeller, 1979). Reliability, fundamentally, “concerns the extent to which an experiment, test, or any
measuring procedure yields the same results on repeated trials” (Ibid, p. 11). Validity, instead, is an
important factor for the effectiveness of a research and this because if a part of research is invalid it
means that is worthless (Cohen et al., 2013). For example, “in qualitative data validity might be
addressed through the honesty, depth, richness and scope of the data achieved, the participants
approached” and “quantitative data validity might be improved through careful sampling,
appropriate instrumentation and appropriate statistical treatments of the data.” (Ibid, p. 133)
The main purpose of this section is to make sure that the thesis is not influenced by contextual or
subjective factors, aiming to reduce bias basing the study on objectivity. Bias are described as an
affection of the research’s findings caused by researcher’s actions (Kerr, 1996). Davis (2011)
attributed one of the causes of bias when a researcher considers the interviewees differently, treating
them inconsistently and this difference in treatment shows the researcher’s assumptions about the
results of the interview, moving from objectivity to subjectivity, tending to change the final outcome
(Ibid).
Throughout this thesis, I tried to implement these concepts and reduce as much as possible all the
bias components, still taking into account that this cannot be avoided totally for the semi-structured
interviews.
4.9.1 Reliability
As previously mentioned, reliability “concerns the extent to which an experiment, test, or any
measuring procedure yields the same results on repeated trials” state Carmines and Zeller (1979, p.
11). In quantitative research there are “three principal types of reliability: stability, equivalence and
internal consistency” (Cohen et al., 2013). In my case I took in consideration the first type, stability,
that measures the consistency over similar samples and over time (Ibid.) This means that in my case

39
when I created the survey in order to collect quantitative data, if tested and retested within a similar
time span on the same sample, the answers to it should be very much alike if not exactly the same.
The time span should be not too short because respondents could remember their answers and just
replicate them without thinking about them, nor too long because in the meanwhile other external
influential factor that could distort the data. The same concept can be applied also for the two
interviews I made. For what concerns stability in the scraper, if tested on similar samples and over
time, since it is a machine that executes commands in the code that I wrote, it will scrape the same
requested fields such as name, number of followers, number of likes and comments.
4.9.2 Validity
By validity “we mean that a research study, its parts, the conclusions drawn, and the applications
based on it can be of high or low quality, or somewhere in between.” (Onwuegbuzie and Johnson,
2006, p.1). There are several different kinds of validity (Cohen et al., 2006) and I decided to take in
consideration two of them: internal validity and external validity. The internal one can be defined as
demonstration that a certain event or data set provided by a piece of research can be sustained by
the data (Ibid.). The external validity “refers to the degree to which the results can be generalized to
the wider population, cases or situations.” (Ibid, p. 136). In this thesis, the internal validity is
provided since all the research done is based on data given by experts in the field and also the data
scraped from real Instagram profiles. Therefore, the conclusions will be based entirely on real
numbers and not just speculations. Also the external validity for this thesis can be considered high.
For instance, the formula is a generic one that can be used across industries and countries. The only
factor that will change is the monetary range of price that brands would be willing to pay for an
Instagrammer with a higher engagement rate within a certain industry and country. Moreover, in
order to validate the JavaScript code of the scraper I wrote, I showed it to a back-end developer
expert in NodeJS to know if the code was valid or if it had bugs there could have affected in some
way the scraping process. After reviewing my code, the developer assured me that everything was
done correctly.

40
4.10 Limitations and Delimitations
This section is meant to discuss all the limitations and delimitations of this thesis and therefore the
many aspects that might influence this thesis aims, choice of methods, analysis of data and its
conclusions.
4.10.1 Limitations
Limitations can be defined as circumstances and concerns that emerge in a study that are out of the
researcher’s control. “They limit the extensity to which a study can go, and sometimes affect the end
result and conclusions that can be drawn.” (Simon & Goes, 2013, p. 1). For example, a study might
have access only to certain data, restricted number of people or specific documents and these are all
limitations (Ibid.).
It is important to remember that generally limitations are a concern that are not in the researcher’s
control and, as declared previously, a researcher not necessarily have to be concerned by limitations,
since they affect all research projects.
Following the above statements, a limitation of this thesis could be the unpredictability of the survey
answers’ rate: for instance, prior to the data collection, I was not aware of how many of the 97
platforms and agencies I have contacted would answer my questions.
4.10.2 Delimitation
Unlike limitations, that as stated previously are implicit characteristic of the methodology chosen or
the access to certain data, delimitations are described as specific decisions made by the researcher
(Simon & Goes, 2013).
Moreover, delimitations create boundaries on the parameters of the study such as the sample
chosen, setting and instrumentation (Bryman & Bell, 2015).
I have decided to delimit my research mostly on the social network Instagram because, according to
the data (Cohen, 2015), is the the best social channel in terms of average interaction rate and it has
now more monthly active users than Twitter (AdWeek, 2016). Moreover, after choosing Instagram
as main social platform, I decided to limit my data collection within the fashion industry, since a vast
number of brands (Buryan, 2016) are active on Instagram operate in that field, as it has been

41
reported by MediaKix that in 2016 looked at the top 200 brands with the highest number of
followers on Instagram and found that 51.5% were in the fashion industry (Mediakix, 2016). For
instance, choosing only one industry allowed me to have a better, deeper and clearer understanding
of the average engagement rate within fashion business.
Another delimitation of this project is the decision to interview only two practitioners, and this was
mostly decided due to the lack of time, using a non-probability sampling in order to collect
information the most related possible to my thesis, having enough time to interview the experts,
record and transcribe the conversations and analyze the data without the risk of running out of time.
Lastly, I chose to focus on the US market because it is the #1 country for active monthly user on
Instagram (Statista, 2016) and this helped me in having more possibility to find enough fashion
Instagrammers for my study. For these reasons, choosing only one industry and one country,
allowed me to have a better and clear understanding of the average engagement rate within fashion
business and delimit my research in order to not have too many average engagement rates also from
other industries or countries that could be very different from the market I am interested in.
5.0 Literature review
As I previously outlined in the above chapters, unfortunately, since influencer marketing is a fairly
new concept, there are not many academic papers on it so far. For this reason I preferred to focus
the literature review on three main topics – Word-of-Mouth Marketing, Influencers and Native
Advertising – that can explain the birth and growth of the advertising techniques which lead to the
creation of the influencer marketing practice.

For instance, as a point of departure, we could argue that influencer marketing relies most of its
effectiveness on the so called Word-of-Mouth Marketing: this practice, also known by practitioners
with the acronym “WOMM”, has been described by Kozinets et al. (2010) as a
consumer-to-consumer communication strategy done by professional marketers with the aim of
influence. WOMM has been studied also by Bughin et al. (2010) who states that – thanks to the
digital revolution – the communication paradigm changed from one-to-one to one-to-many: this

42
means that previously Word-of-Mouth was more an act of private endorsement regarding a brand or
a product and in the last years, instead, it has become a powerful marketing way to present brand
products from one person to many users. Therefore, if we take Bughin’s words into consideration,
the WOMM practice is the technique used by influencers to endorse a certain product to their
audience. For example, this happens every time an influencer posts online a review of a product
presenting pros and cons of it, and doing so, influencing the decision-making process of her/his
followers, since they trust her/his expert opinion. If we stress more the word-of-mouth concept
Brooks (1957), already in the ‘50s, recognized it as a phenomenon that affects a lot of the purchase
decisions with the existence of opinion leaders within communities and groups that are sought by
other people for advice and information regarding the field in which they are experts (Ibid.). The
opinion leader concept has been analyzed also by Corey (1971) and defined as a person that exists in
every socioeconomic group and influences that specific “group's ideas about product-related issues”
(Ibid. p. 57). If we then compare these statements and definitions we can draw the conclusion that
within influencer marketing the last years there has been a terminological shift from “opinion
leader” to “influencer” still having almost the same meaning.
Summing up it is possible to say that Influencer Marketing is an evolution of WOMM and there are
similarities between them, such as the core concept of endorsing a brand or a product to other
people. Anyhow, I personally believe that there are also differences regarding, for example, the
language used, previously more private in a one-to-one communication and lately opened to the
public, and also the media used to influence the others, from more traditional channels to the social
media ones.

To mention another example of how influencers are not a completely new player in our society, a
study conducted by Gladwell (2000) concluded that there are three categories of people that can
influence the others: mavens, connectors and salesmen. “These people are claimed to play a critical
role in the word-of-mouth epidemics that dictate our tastes, trends and fashions” (Budak et al.,
2010). The mavens are those who accumulate knowledge and know which are the best products and
services are on the market and they are willing to share them with other consumers. If a consumer
has a problem or a need, a maven tries to solve it sharing the accumulated knowledge about a certain

43
niche field. This makes mavens experts of a certain topic or niche market and the other users listen
to their opinions, being affected from them (Ibid). The connectors are people with a big network of
connections and mostly work with partnerships and deals. Finally, the salesmen are highly
persuasive, motivated by monetary rewards willing to achieve certain financial goals. These three
categories can be found also within the influencer marketing context and outline the influencer’s
specific skills: for instance the influencer needs to know the topic or the product she/he is speaking
about, like the maven category, she/he needs to be able to create a network and possible
partnerships with brands and agencies, like connectors and ultimately, the influencer needs to help
brands in driving more sales, like salesmen.
on top, if implemented with the other statements on influencer marketing cited in the previous
chapters, it could provide a better understanding of which kind of category a brand needs to look
for before a specific influencer marketing campaign, depending on the brand and the goals it wants
to achieve.

For what concerns the fashion industry, which is the one I have decided to focus on for this thesis,
the decision for practitioners and companies to start working and allocating resources on social
media has been a successful change in direction (Mohr, 2013). Mohr, in his paper, highlights how
much the rise of social media from 2009 and the growth of word-of-mouth marketing helped
fashion brands in making partnerships with influencers getting the “opportunity to improve
customer relationships and to ultimately capture a larger audience” (Ibid., p. 18). On top, also Wolny
& Mueller (2013) argue that fashion trends are co-created by consumers and that fashion can be
seen as a “powerful social symbol used to create and communicate personal as well as group
identities” (Ibid., p. 563). Both the papers go in the direction of co-creation and improvement of the
customer relationship, using social media as the channel where not only brands talk to the
customers, but also a place where customers give feedbacks, co-create contents and influence other
customers. This means that customers are not anymore only passive consumers but that have
become in the last years active players that have the power to influence other customers through
social media channels and therefore they could be considered influencers as well.

44
All in all, based on these two studies mentioned, the analysis of the fashion industry related to the
social media environment is relevant when writing of influencer marketing: for instance, influencers
are - even if partially - driving the communication between fashion brands and the audience,
becoming a substitute of more offline and traditional advertising techniques.

Another important term to take in consideration when we talk about influencer marketing is the one
called “native advertising”. It has been described by Wojdynski & Evans (2016) as “any paid
advertising that takes the specific form and appearance of editorial content from the publisher itself“
(Ibid. p. 1) and has been found that this type of advertising displays less skepticism from viewers if
compared to a text or a banner advertising (Tutaj & Van Reijmersdal, 2012 in Howe & Teufel,
2014). If we take in consideration Instagram, which is the social media channel this thesis is focusing
on, an example of native advertising could be a picture of an influencer that is having a good time
with friends and is wearing a set of specific clothes, writing in the photo’s description information
about the promoted brand products. Native advertising results more effective than banner
advertising also because native ads “recorded an 18% higher lift in purchase intent and a 9% higher
lift for brand affinity responses than traditional banner ads” (Einstein, 2015, p. 231).
For instance Influencer Marketing can be seen as a form of native advertising because brands place
their products in form of editorial contents in influencers’ pictures, video or blog posts, choosing a
soft-selling approach instead of a hard-selling one: the first approach has been defined already in the
80s’ from Mueller as a selling approach more subtle and indirect compared to the second method,
the hard-selling, that has been defined as a direct approach that has the main aim to encouraging a
quick sale (Mueller, 1986).

All in all, we are surrounded by people that can influence our choices. These people have been
named in several ways throughout the years, as introduced above. Influencer Marketing is just a new
way for brands to advertise their products in a more indirect and familiar way for us.
The concepts I read and I added in the literature review have been fundamental for me in order to
understand the background of the influencer marketing practice, where does it come from and how

45
it is grounded, the reasons why it is growing so fast and also that it is a combination of existing
concepts and marketing strategies already applied in the past.
6.0 Theories
This section is meant to introduce the two main theories that have been used as theoretical
framework and that have been combined in an operational model in order to place the influencer
marketing practice within the current and traditional consumer buying process and buying behavior
model theoretical frameworks.
6.1 Consumer buying process
The consumer buying process theory is a fundamental one that I decided to use for this thesis since
it gave me not only an overview of this process step by step, but also because it helped me in
identifying between which of the steps Influencer Marketing lays. Below in Figure 10, is it possible
to see the consumer buying process model from Churchill and Peter (1998).

Figure 10: Gilbert A. Churchill, Jr. J. Paul Peter Chapter 6 Consumer Behavior Marketing.
Source of the slide: Charles (2016, p.3) 9

9
Retrieved from http://slideplayer.com/slide/6509219

46

The model above shows that in the consumer buying process there are three main factors that
influence consumers in the process of buying something: Social Influences, Marketing Influences
and Situational Influences. These three factors are then divided into further six steps: Need/problem
Recognition, Information Search, Alternative Evaluation, Purchase Decision and Postpurchase
Evaluation. In my thesis, I will mostly focus on these two process steps: Alternative Evaluation and
Purchase Decision. These two factors can be influenced by micro and macro-influencers since, as
previously stated, influencers have the power to influence other people during the decision-making
of the buying process, suggesting them to buy a certain product. All in all, this is the reason why I
think this model is applicable to my research questions, since the consumer buying process model is
a fundamental framework to better understand the relationship between consumers and influencers
and where influencers can be positioned within this process.
6.2 Buying behaviour model
Kotler & Armstrong state that “consumer purchases are influenced strongly by cultural, social,
personal, and psychological characteristics” (2010, p. 135). The majority of these factors cannot be
controlled by the marketers but have to be taken in consideration when creating a marketing
campaign (Ibid.).

47
Figure 11: Factors influencing consumer behaviour (Kotler, 2012). Source: Lau (2009, p. 8) 10

Figure 11 above shows the factors that influence the consumer behaviour categorized by Kotler.
The figure includes seven clusters of factors: psychological, personal, marketing programs,
environmental influences, cultural, social and buyer’s responses. To make some examples of factors
for each of the cluster, the psychological ones can be the motivation of a consumer, his/her
perception, beliefs and attitude; the personal ones are age, occupation, economic situation and
lifestyle; for what concerns the social factors, they can be reference groups, family and status (Ibid.).
In my case I will focus on the Marketing Programs factors with the aim to expand and combine
them with some of the Social factors, especially the reference groups. This means adding Influencer
Marketing as a strategy in between Marketing Programs factors and Social factors as I show in the
Figure 12 below that I have created.

10
Retrieved from https://www.slideshare.net/alwynlau/bus169-kotler-chapter-05

Influencer Marketing Thesis

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

What's hot

What's hot (20)

Similar to Influencer Marketing Thesis

Similar to Influencer Marketing Thesis (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Influencer Marketing Thesis