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Introduction
Instagram is a platform that is based on visual aesthetics and filtered images, which makes it a suitable ecosystem for promoting beauty products, popularizing certain body images and advocating luxurious lifestyles and prominent luxury brands (Djafarova and Rushworth, 2017). Instagram is also a social media app that allows users to gather followers, connect with different brands and entities, and facilitate social interactions among consumers (Blight et al., 2017). Considering these unique characteristics of Instagram, this study investigates the utility of leveraging fashion influencers on Instagram in promoting luxury brands.
Fashion enthusiasts have gained popularity and achieved a huge success through Instagram, partly due to the aesthetic appeal of Instagram filters and the platform’s capability to reach wide audiences. The rise of fashion bloggers, referring to individuals who provide fashion tips and introduce certain products and brands via their social media accounts and blog posts, caught the interest of fashion brands (Paton, 2014). What some brands found intriguing is that these Instagram personalities are effective in spreading messages about new products, starting and popularizing new trends and driving up sales. Based on the magnitude of influence, these Instagram celebrities are labeled as the Instafamous (Dewey, 2014). The phenomenon of Instafamous has developed specifically in this platform due to its unique features: ability for social interaction and aesthetical presentation, which allow users to build personal narratives and showcase identities that attract audiences (Abidin, 2016). Nowadays, deploying influencers like Instafamous for branding has become a defining element of social media marketing campaigns (De Veirman et al., 2016). In the fashion domain, most of the promotional efforts take place on Instagram (Carah and Shaul, 2016). However, there is no scholarly research that examines how otherwise ordinary people became so successful and influential as brand endorsers (Comenos, 2018). The current research aims to address this gap.
The key research problem that must be addressed is what explains the prominence of Instagram influencers over traditional celebrities in recent years. To answer this question, we conducted an experiment comparing how users react differently to posts featuring the same product endorsed by two different types of celebrities: traditional celebrities vs Instagram celebrities. Before launching an Instafamous campaign, digital marketers need to test if partnering with Instafamous is more effective for...
