Keywords

1 Introduction

Social media influencers (SMIs) can advise thousands or millions of people at once (Thomas 2019) as they represent ‘a new type of independent third-party endorser who shape audience attitudes through blogs, tweets, and the use of other social media’ (Freberg et al. 2011). Although the research arena of social media influencers has grown immensely in the past few years, several literature gaps can be found that offer researchers the opportunity to push the field forward. As Woods (2016) noticed, there are some serious ethical issues arising from advertising through SMIs, because SMIs can take advantage of their position. In addition, Appel et al. (2019) recognized influencer marketing as a topic that needs immediate attention, especially when it comes to the type of content being posted, influencer’s characteristics and sponsorship. The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the problematic behaviors of SMIs from the perspective of consumers from different generations since it was shown members of generations Z and Y respond differently to influencer marketing efforts (Kadekova and Holienčinová 2018). Existing studies on influencer marketing can generally be divided into the stream dealing with network theory research (e.g. Borrego et al. 2019) and the stream in business research with marketing and advertising journals predominating. In business research authors mainly explore relationships formed between influencers and their followers (Cooley Parks-Yancy 2019; Lou and Yuan 2019; De Veirman et al. 2017) or the interplay between brands and SMIs (e.g. Jimenez-Castillo and Sanchez-Fernandez 2019). Some researchers have taken the agency’s perspective (Stoldt et al. 2019) while some focused on the comparison between platforms used (Arora et al. 2019) and metrics of SMI influence in general (Grave 2019). In understanding the issues associated with SMI, we also need to turn to literature on native advertising, which is a type of advertising where a brand “borrows from the credibility of another publisher by paying to distribute content on the publisher’s platform that resembles the publisher’s own content in format and substance” (Sweetser et al. 2016). The concept itself embraces the idea that some advertising is purposely embedded in the communicator’s content what seems to fit the existing notion of influencer marketing. This brings about various ethical issues, the most common sort being non-disclosure where the question is whether informants disclosed the collaboration with brands to their audience. Stubb et al. (2019) note the importance of disclosure in native advertising showing justification for compensation generates most positive outcomes. Boerman et al. (2017) examined disclosure issue in the context of celebrities as SMIs and showed the negative effects of add recognition are diminished by the fact third-party (not a celebrity) is promoting the brand. And although disclosure was found to increase credibility of influencer marketing (Chapple and Cownie 2017) when the quality of presented content was high (Hwang and Jeong 2019) and increasing of positive attitudes towards the promoted brand (Evans et al. 2017) recent study by Dhanesh and Duthler (2019) indicates followers do not need disclosure since they are aware this kind of collaboration is payed. Compared to existing studies on the disclosure issue (e.g. van Reijmersdal et al. 2016) we undertake an exploratory approach, which provides a more granulated insight into how unethical behavior can be operationalized besides the disclosure issue that had been researched so far and thus the main contribution is expected to be broadening the possible pool of unethical behavior adopted by SMIs, beyond the disclosure itself. Besides that, previous research found it was experience with social media ads, and not the disclosure that leads to ad recognition (Jung and Heo 2019) which makes defining other potential moral issues necessary. In addition, we will provide a comparison of the attitudes of different generational cohorts in terms of different identified problematic activities of SMIs.

In sum, while studies on SMIs have focused on the issue of disclosure, other deceptive practices could be associated with influencer marketing as well. Based on this outline, we propose the following research question which will guide us in the empirical study: Which problematic activities do consumers associate with SMIs?

2 Sample and Methodology

In deciding what kind of research would be appropriate authors decided on using focus groups. The condition to be a suitable respondent was that they have followed or still follow at least one influencer on social media. In total, four focus groups were conducted. In the first two groups, there were 16 respondents belonging to Generation Z (one had 7 respondents, of which 7 were women, the other had 9 respondents, 5 of them were women). The other two focus groups were conducted among respondents of the Generation Y, aged 26 to 32 years. There were 25 respondents in total, 5 of which were male. Focus groups lasted from 40 to 60 min. A semi-structured approach was applied and questions on perception of influencers and potential moral issues in influencer marketing (perceived by respondents as followers) were posed. Transcripts were then analyzed without using a specific software, applying Corbin and Strauss’s (2015) analyzing strategies - making comparisons, thinking about various meaning of a word, looking at language used. Then, on a printed version of transcripts different parts of text were detected and afterwards highlighted in digital version of transcripts.

3 Results

The main interest of this exploratory study was in examining the (un)ethical practices of SMIs. In the following, the main themes that emerged are presented and contrasted by comparing the younger (Generation Z) and older (Generation Y) followers.

Generation Y were the ones questioning who SMIs really are and expressed their skepticism about ‘becoming’ an influencer while respondents from Generation Z did not question it at all. All of the respondents were well aware that influencer marketing is just a novel type of advertising, considering brands that use them are ‘currently the smartest ones’, ‘keeping up with the times’ explaining they would ‘do the same’ and those brands ‘obviously do their job right’.

Not surprisingly, the most often recognized immoral behavior of influencers was related to the lack of disclosure. In addition, the most obvious difference was noticed on the disclosure effect which was the breaking point (i.e. reason to unfollow) for older respondents but did not come up as such for younger respondents. Especially, Generation Y respondents found non-disclosing the link between influencers and brands a serious issue, calling such behavior “horrible” or a “catastrophe!”. These respondents often mentioned morality of influencers as an important component for maintaining influencer-follower relationship, although they also expect the regulatory system to set the ground for those who deceive followers to be properly penalized. However, the younger respondents (20–25 years) showed surprisingly low interest in sponsorship disclosure which is in line with existing research (van Dam and van Reijmersdal 2019; Youn and Shin 2019). They appreciated it but did not think it was necessary: “Not important, I will watch it either way.”, “I don’t see the need for disclosing”. However, respondents of Generation Z were more inclined to stop following influencers because their ‘perfect lives’ made them feel bad about their everyday life. The paper by de Vierman et al. (2017) indicated brand’s perceived uniqueness might be at risk when hiring an influencer with large number of followers to promote divergent products and Torres et al. (2019) found the importance of brand-influencer congruence. Indeed, the biggest concern for younger respondents was the fact some influencers change ‘expertise’ as the number of followers, and consequently brands to collaborate with, grows “I consider that most of those influencers entered that world so to say – normal. I mean they gave good recommendations and so on, but as soon as they reached a certain number of followers and getting paid they shift and see only the money, not only to give a good recommendation.” Generation Y respondents considered it rather frivolous to act as an expert in one field and then, for example, give birth and suddenly become expert in babies. All respondents agreed that authenticity needs to be preserved to be taken seriously and perceived as an expert. In all focus groups the distortion of reality was mentioned as a negative aspect since their deception (in the form of photoshopped pictures, unreal testimonials, showing spoiled way of life) makes them feel bad, about what they do and how they live as the respondents’ life is far from perfect and they can’t even imagine living such a glamorous and careless life: “…I think with young people it evokes jealousy and envy that someone can get big money so easily and then you think to yourself ‘why would I bother? Why would I study and go to college why would I, I don’t know do some hard-physical work when it can be that easy?’”. As Byrne et al. (2017) noticed, SMIs often “share false or misleading nutritional information with no scientific evidence” and Coates et al. (2019) examined SMI’s influence on changing children eating habit, both of which can lead to negative outcomes. Younger respondents in this research, obviously not so concerned with disclosure issues, did show serious concerns about potentially problematic promotion of some product categories has on the follower’s life: “…one product can be harmful and the other not, for example proteins (food supplement) can cause harm as oppose to make-up or clothes.”. This is especially problematic for non-convenience products or services which are not used every day, are of high value and have a great effect on people’s lives. In all groups respondents expected some kind of protection against influencer and brand immoral actions, the only difference is some believe that it is the platform that has to make sure the followers were protected and in some cases it was the state law: “As for the regulation - if in real life someone can’t sell medicine around and has to have pharmaceutical degree on Instagram it should be someone with a degree.”, “…I think it is important that the platform, i.e. Facebook (sets rules).”, “Social network has to set rules on what can be advertised and disclosed…”.

4 Conclusion

Despite research on native advertising concentrated on the issue of disclosure as the most common deceptive behavior, the results of this study imply that Generation Y might be the last generation receptive to this issue. Future generations of followers (i.e. Generation Z) that grew up with social media will look at emerging advertising tools through a different lens. This might be due to the fact on social media Generation X trust mainly other users but Generation Y trusts company-generated information which would explain they accept SMIs as an extension of brands and see nothing disputable there. Our study provided a deeper understanding on both generational differences related to social media, and deceptive practices in SMI advertising that are worth addressing in future research. Thus, the main theoretical contribution is operationalization of immoral behavior employed in influencer marketing. As for practical implications, marketers should provide their audiences with enough evidence of SMI expertise and be careful when hiring SMI, especially when targeting consumers from different generational cohorts.