Proceedings of The 6th International Conference on Future of Social Sciences
Year: 2023
DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.33422/6th.icfss.2023.09.121
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The Impact of Influencers Marketing on Children’s Buying Behavior
Ljupka Naumovska
ABSTRACT:
The amount of time children are exposed to digital devices and social media platforms is continuously rising. As a parallel stream, children’s impact on budget allocation and expenditures is becoming stronger as they are becoming more influential in domestic budget allocation decisions. As the overall volume of the digital marketing industry is growing, the rise of marketing influencers is noted as one of the fastest growing forms due to their peculiar persuasive power and due to the ways of promoting products that often take the form of organic content.
The 2 simultaneously rising trends: 1) rising exposure of children on all social media and digital devices and 2) the rising trends of influencer marketing are opening a set of social and legal concerns connected with the scarce advertising skills children have at the age below 12, more precisely their underdeveloped cognitive ability to separate persuasive (paid) versus organic content. Some of these concerns are already addressed across all stakeholders’ levels: academic, industry, and institutional, however no coherent, precise policies, regulations, or relevant insides are yet available. In addition to that, research on negative impact on Influencers marketing is very poor.
It’s important to note that influencer marketing as a promotional tool features very specific characteristics and unique ways of displaying content that often blur the line between organic and paid, while regulations of Influencer Marketing are very poor and not precise enough. Sponsored posts, stories, reels, short videos, and other similar forms of influencer promotional tools are exceedingly persuasive and potentially influential on young children’s product liking, aspirations for social acceptance, snobbism, obesity, and even states of anxiety. Therefore, urgent attention to regulations is required by all concerned stakeholders: institutions and governments, parents, and industry.
The paper elaborates on the reasons behind the rapid increase of Marketing Influencers as a new form in the digital advertising industry offering tailored and persuasive content in a very efficient way. In the second part of this paper, analyses of discussions of studies on Influencer Marketing and their influence on children are offered in the context of implications and consequences, and then in the last part existing regulations are analysed. For this purpose a systemic literature research method is applied using search key words and systematically selecting the relevant studies. In general, existing research findings on the methods marketing influencer use to target children are very scarce, probably due to their novelty; this paper hence aims to underline the reasons why marketing influencers have persuasive power over their audience, especially young followers, then explores the methods and persuasive tactics they use and offers and based on these findings offers a platform for future research agenda for further exploring the negative implications and inviting research on further regulations.
Keywords: social media platforms, marketing influencers, children, digital advertising, paid content