IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/sprchp/978-3-031-14961-0_16.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Virtual Influencer as a Brand Avatar in Interactive Marketing

In: The Palgrave Handbook of Interactive Marketing

Author

Listed:
  • Alice Audrezet

    (Institut Français de La Mode)

  • Bernadett Koles

    (IÉSEG School of Management)

Abstract

Social media influencers have become an integral part of most brands’ interactive marketing strategy for the past 15 years. Leveraging their unique content and substantial follower base, brands benefit from innovative forms of consumer engagement above and beyond more traditional firm-driven approaches. Alongside the numerous human influencers, a new opinion leader—virtual influencers—entered the stage with early examples launched in 2016. Virtual influencers are computer-generated characters or avatars designed and maintained by experts and digital agencies that help brands appeal to and reach desirable target groups effectively through their digital personalities. Despite their potential impact, little is known to date about these virtual opinion leaders. The purpose of this chapter is to offer a detailed presentation of virtual influencers within their ecosystem, taking into consideration their human influencer counterparts as well as consumer perceptions. Building on an extensive review of the literature and exploratory interviews with a group of young consumers, we make specific recommendations for brands as to how to incorporate virtual influencers into their interactive marketing strategy. This chapter is concluded by offering avenues for future research to help scholars and practitioners interested in pursuing this area and boost their understanding of this innovative and promising digital entity.

Suggested Citation

  • Alice Audrezet & Bernadett Koles, 2023. "Virtual Influencer as a Brand Avatar in Interactive Marketing," Springer Books, in: Cheng Lu Wang (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Interactive Marketing, chapter 0, pages 353-376, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-031-14961-0_16
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-14961-0_16
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Koles, Bernadett & Audrezet, Alice & Moulard, Julie Guidry & Ameen, Nisreen & McKenna, Brad, 2024. "The authentic virtual influencer: Authenticity manifestations in the metaverse," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 170(C).
    2. Gerrath, Maximilian H.E.E. & Olya, Hossein & Shah, Zahra & Li, Huaiyu, 2024. "Virtual influencers and pro-environmental causes: The roles of message warmth and trust in experts," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 175(C).
    3. Zhao, Taiyang & Ran, Yaxuan & Wu, Banggang & Lynette Wang, Valerie & Zhou, Liying & Lu Wang, Cheng, 2024. "Virtual versus human: Unraveling consumer reactions to service failures through influencer types," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 178(C).
    4. Liu, Fanjue & Lee, Yu-Hao, 2024. "Virtually responsible? Attribution of responsibility toward human vs. virtual influencers and the mediating role of mind perception," Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Elsevier, vol. 77(C).
    5. Wang, Xiaoyi & Qiu, Xingyi, 2024. "The positive effect of artificial intelligence technology transparency on digital endorsers: Based on the theory of mind perception," Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Elsevier, vol. 78(C).
    6. Belanche, Daniel & Casaló, Luis V. & Flavián, Marta, 2024. "Human versus virtual influences, a comparative study," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 173(C).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-031-14961-0_16. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.