The Development of Persuasion Knowledge through Influencer Marketing

Influencers can use several advertising techniques to disclose the promotional nature of their posts. Extant research assess consumers’ perceptions (i.e. recognition and evaluation) of advertising techniques by evaluating the users’ ability to recall the advertising disclosure. Following the notion of the persuasion knowledge model, we argue that focusing solely on users’ explicit perception of advertising cues is too short-sighted, as users can also evaluate the promotional nature of influencer posts by recognizing implicit cues inherent in the design of the influencer post. The results of two experimental studies show that consumer perceptions of influencer posts are formed explicitly and implicitly. From a managerial perspective, the results provide guidelines on how to best set up influencer posts in terms of which advertising disclosure design to use, where to place it and how to design the posts in order to affect users perceptions and attitude towards the brand positively.