Men or Women? Neuro-Marketing Study of Social Media Influencers

Given the widespread popularity of social media, such as Facebook, lnstagram, Youtube, a new type of independent endorser occurs known as social media influencers. Social media influencers exhibit their personal life through posts to many followers and influence their follower's attitudes and engagement behaviour. However, many firms seek to collaborate with social media influencers and reach their potential customers through brand sponsored posts. Therefore, the better the understanding of customer engagement behaviour within brand sponsored posts is fundamental for firms in achieving brand awareness, new customers or/and driving sales. Customer engagement with social media posts involves active customer responses (e.g., Like) and passive participation (e.g., view). Yet, little is known about how customers engage with influencer informational content posts that are sponsored by a luxury fashion brand. There is also scant attention to the gender of social media influencers, to posts accompanied with a luxury brand product and its influence on customer attention patterns. These customer attention patterns are gauged by neuro-marketing techniques that are not accessible through traditional marketing methods. Therefore, this research seeks to examine customer responses to social media influencer posts, focusing on posts with a luxury brand product, emotional cues of text (i.e., emoji), and influencer gender. The research also investigates how the gender of an influencer affects how a follower reacts to a post, especially when promoting a brand product. To examine customer responses, a combination of self-report and eye-tracking methodology was used, where social media posts by a male influencer generated greater customer attention on a luxury product. However, social media post by a female influencer generated more customer likes while the post by males generated more customer views. Thus, customers ignored emotional cues of posts (e.g., heart-eye emoji) which are presented at the end of sentences. Importantly, the paper provides a pioneering attempt in examining the relationship between features of social media influencer posts and customer responses.