Abstract
This research tested the “bad influencer” effect, whereby consumers are less willing to connect with people on social media who post about their indulgence (vs. self-control) with respect to the goals valued by those consumers. We present six studies that test the bad-influencer effect across multiple domains involving indulgence (vs. self-control): eating indulgent (vs. healthy) foods, spending time mindlessly (vs. mindfully), and using profane (vs. proper) language. Our findings show consumers are less willing to connect with people whose social media posts appear indulgent (vs. self-controlled) because they believe such posters will more negatively influence their own valued goals (i.e., interpersonal instrumentality expectations). We further identify two theoretically derived moderators of the bad-influencer effect: goal commitment amplifies the effect, whereas goal suppression attenuates the effect. Finally, we show that willingness to connect (WTC) has downstream consequences for consumers’ receptivity to word-of-mouth (WOM) recommendations made by posters. Our research suggests that content creators and marketing managers seeking to maximize connections should avoid sharing content that appears indulgent with respect to their target audience’s goals.
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Data Availability
The data and preregistration files for all studies in the manuscript and supplements can be found on Open Science Framework (OSF) at the following links: https://bit.ly/BadInfluencerEffect and https://osf.io/jk862/?view_only=fa1f2f0a2df64af3a6ebf7ef988fd409.
Notes
The “grid” consists of a collection of the top trending nine posts from each day, across all Instagram accounts using a particular hashtag, arranged in a 3 × 3 layout.
To assess whether multicollinearity was an issue in our analysis, and specifically high correlation between instrumentality expectations and each of the eight alternative mechanisms, we computed the variance inflation factor (VIF) for each predictor on WTC. No predictor’s VIF exceeds 5 (all VIF’s ≤ 3.02), which indicates that multicollinearity is not a significant issue based on existing rules-of-thumb (Marcoulides and Raykov 2019). See Additional Analysis in Web Appendix D for full results.
We classified these participants as “moderately” committed due to our pretest (see Pretest 1 in Web Appendix A) that showed that most participants in our pool are at least moderately committed to mindfulness goals (e.g., spending their time mindfully, watching less TV) even if they don’t have a specific meditation practice. Setting (vs. lacking) a specific meditation goal therefore better maps onto high (vs. moderate) commitment to mindfulness goals.
Note: We retained all overfill responses, which exceeded our preregistered sample size. Not all participants responded to every measure, which is reflected in the degrees of freedom in our analyses.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge and thank Eli J. Finkle for his comments on an early draft of this paper and Joshua T. Beck for his comments on the paper in its later stages. The authors thank Luiza Peres Tanoue Troncoso for her extensive and excellent research assistance. The authors are grateful to The John and Emiko Kageyama Endowment Fund for partially funding this research.
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Gamlin, J., Touré-Tillery, M. The bad-influencer effect: Indulgence undermines social connection. J. of the Acad. Mark. Sci. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-024-01024-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-024-01024-x