Building Stronger Brand Evangelism for Sustainable Marketing through Micro-Influencer-Generated Content on Instagram in the Fashion Industry

Abstract

Micro-influencers have become powerful sources of information for consumers in the digital age. Marketers have strategically collaborated with micro-influencers as brand endorsers to generate valuable content, which attract the consumers and encourage them to engage with micro-influencers, leading to brand evangelism. This reflects the sustainable consumer-brand relationships. In Southeast Asia, Instagram stands out as the preferred choice for fashion influencers for sharing product information and boosting consumer engagement. The current study is the first one incorporating literature-based frameworks, consisting of consumer-based digital content marketing, information relevance theory, observational learning theory, consumer-influencer engagement behavior, and brand evangelism, into a unified framework to deal with the research gaps. The quantitative method was applied through using partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The SmartPLS v. 3.3.9 software application was applied to explore the proposed model. The data were acquired from 499 Thai consumers who have followed and engaged the content with fashion micro-influencers on Instagram. The results revealed that the positive effect of topicality of content is the strongest antecedent that motivates consumer-influencer engagement, while novelty, understandability, reliability, interestingness, and influencers’ authenticity of content also have a positive influence on consumer-influencer engagement. Finally, the findings showed that consumer-influencer engagement have vital effects on brand evangelism.