Introduction of Influencer Marketing

Marketers spend a large number of budgets on advertisement campaigns while does not acknowledge that the most persuading source to the consumers are the suggestions from the source, they are trust (Bughin, Doogan, Vetvik, 2010). Consumer tend to trust their peers. According to World-of-Mouth marketing association (2014) showed that up to 13% of sales are coming from word-of-mouth. defined word-of-mouth was defined by Westbrook in 1987 as an informal communication behavior about their involvement and experience about specific products or services and it is the characteristics of the brand that consumers share their experiences with each other (Westbrook, 1987). Influencer is considered as the person that has a large number of followers on their account. According to the research (Maria Kolarova, 2018), the micro-influencer is more effective than traditional celebrities as they positively affect on brant trust and purchase intention. Moreover, Micro influencer are perceived as more relatable. According to Nielsen report, 92% of consumers tend to believe suggestion from their family and friend so these day marketers try to utilize or capitalize by communicating their massage through micro influencer on social media platform. Most of the brand will contact with the influencer agencies where the agencies will try assisting the suitable influencer for each task. Using influencers marketing become commonly use. Also, consumer tend to embraces the behavior, action or opinion from the group that he or she wanted to be as the social identity of a consumer is determined by the certain group or community that consumers wanted to be part of (Nejad, M. G., Sherrell, D. L., & Babakus, E. ,2014).

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An opinion leader is a person whore has the opinion about things such as product or services and would have big influence to other’s opinion. The definition of opinion leader was further defined by (Teramoto, Inoue, & Saito, 2005) that it is a person that can influencer people around the influencer using their personal communication, as opinion leader’s world-of-mouth will also motivate the audience to purchase certain products, services or brand. Therefore, marketers have been trying to utilize the use of opinion leader. The result from studies shows that opinion leaders can influence person’s purchase behavior by sending messages of their own using experience about the product or services and communicating to many kinds of people as network hub.

According from (Leal, Hor-Meyll, & de Paula Pessôa, 2014), opinion leader are person who has at least one of this characteristic which includes person who are a highly active member in the community, often participating and giving relevant contributions and people that have good taste. (De Veirman, Cauberghe, & Hudders, 2017) expressed that follower base of an individual on social platform (e.g. Instagram) may have an impact on their popularity that may make people consider them as an opinion leader, therefore an influencer on Instagram may also be referred as opinion leader as well. The most social platform that widely used by opinion leader is Instagram because it has a great immediacy and higher engagement rate if we compare with other social media platform (Casaló, Flavián and Ibáñez-Sánchez, 2018).

Instagram

Instagram is aa media sharing platform, it was created Kevin Systrom and Mike Kriegerby on 6 October 2010, it was initially introduced as an mobile pictures and photo sharing platform application with the purpose of taking photos and sharing to others users in the application where the users is able to apply different options such as filters and other effect on their photos and also

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can share photos on other social media platform for example Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and so forth. In this present, Instagram is one of the most famous and well-known social media applications all over the world with having more than 1 billion monthly active users around the globe and rank the 3^rd place after Facebook and YouTube among social media platform. (Kallas 2 September 2019) . The media sharing sites such as Instagram or YouTube have an influence during the pre-service stage of customer journey since it would allow a user to share informative content while also reach large number of prospect customers. There are various of features that marketers use for generating communication during customer journey Zarrella (2010, 81-83).

● Organic Content: The first way is when the brand publish content in social media platform in their own account. The second is the social media user create and post media content such as text, pictures, video and so on in the social media platform.

● Digital Asset Optimization or DAO: The process to increase awareness of the customer by getting its existing content to appear in search engine result.

● Tags: An effective way to get more engagement. Tagging is the act of creating a tag on social media. For an example, A celebrity attached a label or tag to pictures or videos. Tags allows user to find content

● Hashtags: Keywords that are added on the posts by using # symbol. For an example, A celebrity used #chanelthailand (Figure 1), This hashtag is clickable and allow other users to go to the page that gather all other posts that use the same tags.

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Figure 1 An example of Celebrity in Instagram

Instagram users in Thailand

According to the statistic from Naplolecat (Dec 2019), There were 12,143,000 users in Thailand in December 2019 which accounted for more than 17% of population in Thailand.

Women is accounted for 63.6% and the largest user group (4,500,000 users) is people aged between 18 and 24.

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Figure 2 Instagram users in Thailand Source: NapoleonCat