Men in Dress? A Multi-layer Incongruence Model in Influencer Marketing: Role of Consumers’ Cognition, Emotion and Purchase Intention

Abstract

Businesses increasingly invest in influencers, as the importance of influencer marketing is growing exponentially worldwide. Online influencers, especially in Asia, are increasingly employing incongruence-based (e.g. male advertising a female dress) strategies in their advertising. By developing a Digital Influencer Incongruence (DII) framework, this study explores three types of incongruence (influencer, product category and online platform) and their effect on purchase intention through consumers’ cognitive and affective processes. The DII framework underlines the importance of three entities (influencer, product categories and platform) as well as the schemas (gender, motivation and expertise) that connect these entities. To test this conceptual model, I conducted three experimental studies on Credamo, a Chinese survey platform, by recruiting 60, 120 and 240 respondents for three studies, respectively. Results confirm that when advertisements feature gender incongruence alone, gender incongruence has a direct negative effect on purchase intention. Further, when an advertisement features joint effects of incongruence,(i.e. displaying more than one type of incongruence) consumers tend to have lower purchase intentions because of their difficulties in processing the information (disfluency) and negative emotions (discomfort) projected to the advertisement. This is the first study to explore the effect of incongruence on customers’ emotional processes (discomfort) in addition to their cognitive ones. The current research not only aids the generation of future hypotheses in exploring different layers of incongruence in different schemas, but also as background research in advertisement design that should be cautious when using incongruent elements.