Thesis
While Instagram provides a powerful tool for influencers to shape brands and interact with audiences, its highly curated nature often leads to maintaining authenticity, as influencers face pressure between genuine expression and conforming to branding strategies, thus undermining the trustworthiness of their online personas.
ABSTRACT
This essay delves into the evolving dynamics of authenticity versus aesthetic appeal among influencers on Instagram, focusing on the ramifications for follower trust and influencer-brand relationships. It examines how influencers prioritise visual allure over authenticity, often resorting to cosmetic alterations and filters to maintain an idealized image. While influencers wield significant sway over follower purchasing behavior, concerns arise regarding the authenticity of sponsored content and its impact on trust. The essay also scrutinizes the tension between influencers and brand partnerships, wherein commercial imperatives may compromise authenticity. Furthermore, it contrasts the challenges faced by micro- and macro-influencers in navigating authenticity within their content and engagement strategies. Despite their divergent approaches, both categories confront issues of credibility and trustworthiness. Ultimately, the essay advocates for influencers to prioritize authenticity to foster stronger connections with followers, even amidst the pressures of commercialisation. Through nuanced consideration of these themes, influencers can enhance their reputations and cultivate more genuine relationships with their audiences.
Introduction
Over the years, social media has developed into a more influential platform especially Instagram where influencer plays a great role in creating their identity and credibility for their followers. To maintain the peak norm of Instagram’s feed, influencers feel compelled to value their feed’s visual attractiveness more than being authentic. The influencers’ main focus is to present an unrealistic feature of themselves, thus distorting the authenticity of what they share on Instagram. Moreover, this essay will explore how there is a contradictory conflict between how influencers prioritize the visual appearance of content over their authenticity which clearly shows how their followers see things on a different side. Furthermore, engagement in creating content that will focus on getting more likes, comments, and sharing can show that influencers are sacrificing their curated self over representing a fake image of themselves on Instagram to get high visibility and grow their followers. Additionally, famous brands and sponsors such as clothes, perfumes, and high-class restaurants are being engaged with famous influencers to boost their brand image which leads influencers to ignore their authenticity to meet the sponsors’ expectations. In this case, this can dishonor the images of branding strategies and its reputation. The essay will also delve into the different aspects of micro-influencers and macro influencers, how they are viewed differently and how they maintain a good relationship with their followers through authenticity.
Influencers’ visual appearance
In modern times, Instagram has become one of the famous platforms for influencers to promote different businesses and sponsor various brandings to increase engagement and credibility among their followers. However, Instagram’s real fact about influencers is to put more emphasis on the aesthetic appearance of their feeds by forcing influencers to take advantage of the visual appeal instead of their authenticity. In most cases, influencers will sacrifice their body for cosmetic surgery such as lip filters and breast augmentation to enhance their beautiful appearance for likes and views instead of showing their original beauty to their followers which leads them to failure, or in other cases, they just add some filters to manipulate their face and body. Mascheroni G, Vincent J, Jimenez E (2015) argues that influencers are most likely to modify a self-presentation of themselves on Instagram not realizing that they are portraying their physical appearance in the image. This point delves into how an influencer does not realize how an appearance on social media can be different compared to in real life. For example, many influencers that are mostly popular on Instagram, manipulate their body by making them look skinny or hide their imperfection does not portray how your followers will see them in person and may not even recognize you. People may argue that influencers have the right to undergo various cosmetics or add any filter because Instagram is a platform that provides self-expression but Instagram is encouraging influencers to showcase their aesthetic appeal on the platform to attract new followers with unpleasant content.
Followers purchase behaviour
Influencers will most likely influence their followers’ purchasing behavior by promoting a brand that they somehow like or that they were being paid to do specific advertising of a product. For example, there is a feature on Instagram that will let the audience know that those influencers paid a partnership with the brand to advertise their products. Instagram often looks at influencer who has credibility and consider them as trusted sources, but some questions may arise about how authentic they are with the products and how they persuade their followers to buy this product. Ki et al. (2020) and Correa et al. (2020) stated they found that followers who are attached to a social media influencer directly affect their attitude towards the product or brand advertised by the influencer, which likely leads to building trust in that specific product or brand. This point is true because followers will lead them to trust the influencer’s review of the product and think that this is an effective product. For example, some influencers will mostly do reviews on skincare products that were being sponsored by them thus trying to create a trustworthiness issue in this situation. For instance, some followers noticed that the sponsored content was unauthentic and ineffective and started to post concerns about the product and how expensive it was. Moreover, it is stated that Venciūtė et al., (2023) consumers are likely to pursue a brand based on its self-identity and the brand’s value. Based on what Venciūtė et al., (2023) said, I agree that some consumers will be most likely to form favorable attitudes towards a brand that does not promote its products by using influencers but creates its self-value and culture to boost consumer loyalty.
Sponsorship and brand partnership
Another issue with influencers is how sometimes they face pressure to structure their content based on the brand strategies from sponsors and brand partnerships which may lead to disagreement in enhancing their authenticity. On the other hand, this can be an advantage for the influencer to increase their followers and views in the content they are creating and get payback on what they are doing. Brand partnership and sponsorship often have some strict guidelines to follow to achieve a successful brand strategy and attract customers. One true thing that Kozinets et al., (2010) have stated is that followers can accuse influencers of selling themselves out of money because of how influencers’ content may be negative and fake and therefore criticize the influencers’ content. In this case, an influencer’s authenticity should be valuable to increase their chance of maintaining a good image of themselves. Moreover, Audrezet et al (2020) stated that influencers should know how to balance their authenticity behavior and commercial opportunities and this is an accurate point of view because it also relates to the reputation of those influencers to communicate the right message to the audiences. As their name says, they should influence their followers honestly and genuinely and be true to themselves. Influencers are obliged to create content that is based on the brand sponsorship’s aesthetic aspect which therefore does not contribute to the aesthetic appeal of the influencer’s content which results in unauthentic views of the influencer. To mark the points that were said, sponsors that lack authenticity and honesty in the content they are sharing can lead to disagreement with audiences.
Micro and Macro influencers in engaging with authenticity
Conde & Casais (2023) define micro-influencers as ordinary people who target only a small amount of people and macro-influencers are defined by how they have become popular on social media and have built recognition with their audience. However, even though they are quite different in their characteristics, they somehow still face challenges in maintaining authenticity. Moreover, macro influencers will face problems with managing authenticity because of their highly reputed profile and challenges faced by various brands which may lead to insincerity with their followers. On the other hand, micro-influencers face the same problems as being connected with a smaller audience but have a high engagement with their followers, they are not able to balance authenticity with brands. Based on the research of Campbell and Farrell (2020); Moffitt and Azarfar (2021); Porteous (2018); and Sinkwitz (2020), micro-influencers have more potential to build close relationships and trust with their audience and are considered to be credible by their audiences. They have more advantages in having loyal audiences because these type of influencers can control their followers with captivating content and obtain excellent engagement rates in authenticity. Macro influencers have more diverse and loyal audiences and have better potential to reach the market, brands, and sponsors. They are easier to contact as they are recognized by most people compared to micro-influencers. From the provided research, it is evident that followers will focus on influencers who are more authentic and share relevant content with sincere reviews of products compared to macro-influencers who are willing to pay a large amount to highly reputed brands for the sake of getting more engaged with followers. For example, macro influencers’ main focus is to build an aesthetic feed based on their taste and preference but famous sponsors are ready to give a large amount of money to influencers to promote their brand not assuming that the content can be unauthentic for the influencer and can get a sense of alienation from their followers. Moving on micro influencers that can specialize in a specific aspect such as focusing on nature and animals can be set as credible inspirations for the community. They will align themselves with partners which have the same values and aesthetics, therefore their authenticity towards their audience can be trusted.
Conclusion
In this article, there have been several debates on how influencers portrayed themselves between their aesthetic appeal and authenticity. They sacrifice in representing their true side of themselves to focus more on sponsorship and partnership despite the pressure of respecting some aesthetic content. This results in maintaining the trustworthiness of their online personas, thus impacting the relationship between their followers and audiences. Cosmetic surgery is not an alarming strategy in today’s world, as influencers take this chance to adapt themselves to their followers’ expectations toward them therefore distancing themselves from being natural and authentic. This issue can have several impacts on how followers will portray the influencers as being unauthentic. A lack of trustworthiness and honesty can impact the image of influencers on how they influence their followers with purchasing behavior. The product that they are promoting can prevent credibility if the content is not genuine. Additionally, the conflicts between influencer and brand partnerships can determine how influencers reject authenticity against commercial advertising. While they are offering a good opportunity to build their reputation, they are also taking a risk in focusing on the brand sponsors instead on their authenticity. Lastly, micro-influencers and macro-influencers have several impacts on how they represent themselves to their followers while micro focuses on the aesthetic aspects and gaining loyal followers, and macro focuses on the reputation aspects ignoring to represent their genuine self to their followers. By cultivating these arguments, influencers can start building good trust with their audience and prioritizing themselves over branding strategies.
REFERENCES
Audrezet, A., de Kerviler, G., & Moulard, J. G. (2020). Authenticity under threat: When social media influencers need to go beyond self-presentation. Journal of business research, 117, 557–569.
Ki, C.W.C., Cuevas, L.M., Chong, S.M. and Lim, H. (2020), Influencer marketing: social media influencers as human brands attaching to followers and yielding positive marketing results by fulfilling needs. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Vol. 55, p. 102133.
Kozinets, R. V., De Valck, K., Wojnicki, A. C., & Wilner, S. J. S. (2010). Networked narratives: Understanding word-of-mouth Marketing in Online Communities. Journal of Marketing, 74(2), 71–89.
Mascheroni G, Vincent J, Jimenez E (2015). Girls are addicted to likes so they post semi-naked selfies: peer mediation, normativity and the construction of identity online. Cyberpsychol J Psychosoc Res Cyberspace. https://doi.org/10.5817/CP2015-1-5
Venciūtė, D., Mackeviciene, I., Kušlys, M., & Correia, R. (2023). The role of influencer–follower congruence in the relationship between influencer marketing and purchase behaviour. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretconser.2023.103506
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Brilliant Noise. (2023, May 11). The power of authenticity in influencer marketing. https://brilliantnoise.com/blog/brilliant-reads-the-power-of-authenticity-and-creativity-in-influencer-marketing/
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