The Domestic Research on Influence Marketing: A Critical Review and Future Research Agenda

Purpose: Marketing activities utilizing influencers have recently demonstrated significant results, establishing themselves as an effective marketing tool for companies. Despite the substantial success of influencer marketing and the considerable interest it has garnered from practitioners and scholars, the outcomes of various empirical studies remain unstructured and dispersed. Considering the diverse application of influencer marketing across different fields, a systematic organization of these empirical study r esults is essential to provide an integrated framework for future research. This study aims to consolidate the findings and focus on the dominant concepts of 70 domestic empirical studies on influencer marketing published between 2019 and 2022. Research design, data, and methodology: The 70 articl es in the pool underwent content analysis, considering the stated purposes, research questions or hypotheses, key arguments, and main constructs to identify the phenomena each article addressed. Each article was then assigned a descriptive statement summarizing its focus, from which initial thematic names were derived. Following this, the articl es w ere repeatedly sorted and compared to group them u nder the identified thematic names. Results: T his research i dentified five k ey themes: ( 1) t he i nfl uence of source characteristics on consumer outcomes; (2) the impact of psychological factors on consumer outcomes; (3) the effect of content attributes on consumer outcomes; (4) the role of sponsorship disclosure in shaping consumer outcomes; and (5) the strategic evaluation of influencers as a marketing tool. Implications: It provides insights for researchers to conduct new studies by addressing academic gaps identified in existing research. Additionally, it facilitates the selection of new topics for exploration within the field based on the analyzed data, aiding in easier access to the research domain.