The Evolution of Influencer–Follower Relationships: A Life-Cycle Approach: An Abstract

Companies’ spending on influencer marketing campaigns is growing exponentially. In 2016, firms invested more than $80 billion on influential social media users (ANA 2018). These users are considered “influential” as they contribute to the formation of attitudes toward products and services of a large number of other social media users. The basic idea underlying this novel marketing communication technique is that influencers build a relationship over time with those who follow their social media pages and thereby gain their trust and confidence. However, despite its massive growth and promising advantages, influencer marketing is still a considerably underexplored technique. Prior research has focused on influencer authenticity (Audrezet et al. 2018), likeability (De Veirman et al. 2017), the credibility of influencer posts (Boerman et al. 2017), and success metrics of influencer campaigns (Grafe and Greff 2018), while the dynamics of influencer-follower relationships remain unexplored. In this paper, we develop and empirically test a life-cycle model of such influencer–follower relationships.