Influencer advertising, sponsored, and non-sponsored: A study on how message types affect consumer purchase intention

Abstract: Background Social media influencer advertising is a fast-growing form of advertising. It has led to companies striking deals with influencers to benefit from the influencers’ big audiences of followers and social media users. Influencers promote the companies’ brands and/or products in exchange for a payment. Influencer advertising comes in two forms, sponsored and non-sponsored, factors that can have a significant effect on purchase intention when combined with different message types as pictures, text, and a combination of picture and text and trust. Objective This report's primary goal is to study the effect of trust, message type, sponsored, and non-sponsored advertising on consumers' purchase intentions on social media and contribute to previous studies.  Method This study is a quantitative study with primary data. The method used for collecting the data is an online survey. The survey has been divided into two parts and sent out to the Swedish population who uses social media. One with questions on sponsored advertisements’ and another with questions of non-sponsored advertisements. In total, the surveys had 107 complete responses. The data was then analyzed using IBM’s SPSS program.  Result Tests for the first hypothesis found no significant difference in the mean values of sponsored and non-sponsored advertisements' effect on purchase intentions. The second hypothesis established that the use of a picture message-type in advertisements had a more significant impact on purchase intention then a combination of both text and picture. The last and final hypothesis result found that influencer advertisements, sponsored or non-sponsored did not affect consumers' trust in any significant way and therefore did not affect purchase intention.  Conclusion Companies should take into consideration the benefit of utilizing influencer-picture advertisements’ when it comes to the promotion of easily understood products, such as water bottles. Further work also needs to be done on more underlying factors that can affect consumers' purchase intentions.   Keywords Influencer, Sponsored advertising, Non-sponsored advertising, Online survey, Message type