Perception of Influencers among Young Consumers: An Overview of Marketing Communication Practices in Social Media from a Social Comparison Perspective

The fact that influencers are being employed more and more as an alternative marketing communication strategy makes it important to determine the social comparison processes about these people and how they are perceived by the target audiences. This research aims to discuss how influencers in social media are perceived by their followers and its reflections on marketing communication practices utilitizing the perspective of social comparison. The study was carried out with a qualitative research design, including 16 university students who actively use social media and follow at least two different influencers. The data were collected by the semi-structured interview technique and analyzed with an inductive analysis approach. As a result of the interviews, the participants' views on influencers were gathered under the themes of "perceptions of and motivations to follow influencers", "emotions and social comparisons for influencers" and "brand-influencer collaboration and social comparison". According to the results of the research, it is seen that the participants have positive inclinations towards influencers they feel close to, positive impressions appear mostly as upward assimilation, and that downward assimilation codes such as sympathy and pity, albeit limited, are encountered. In addition, while upward contrastive emotions such as jealousy and envy are frequently encountered, downward contrastive emotions are also observed when the influencer is seen as inadequate. When viewed from the perspective of influencer-brand cooperation, it has been determined that the influences' going out of the natural flow by sharing advertising content is received negatively by consumers.