Hidden Motives?

The growth of social media has made it an interesting area for marketers to target, as it provides marketers with a new way to reach potential and existing customers. A marketing strategy that has become very popular on social media is product placement through the use of social media influencers. This entails that an influencer - who is an independent third party, with usually a lot of followers - promotes a certain product in a social media post. The goal is to create brand awareness and brand recall which will lead to increase sales at a point of purchase. At this moment, not all influencers that have been compensated for a social media post include a disclosure in that post expressing this. This has caused online and offline discussions in the media about the topic of deceptive endorsement by social media influencers, which formed the motivation for this research. In order to find out if current Dutch laws are sufficient or should be amended it is important to establish how Dutch Instagram users are affected by branded content posted by social media influencers. The research was conducted by performing twelve semi-structured interviews with Dutch consumers. During the interviews a small-scale experiment was integrated to find out if respondents recognize elements of product placement on Instagram. All interviews were transcribed and the data was analyzed through open and axial coding. The results yielded that respondents perceived themselves to be less influenced by product placement on Instagram than others. A form of moral panic was detected towards children and lower educated people. This is remarkable because the experiment showed that the respondents were overconfident regarding their own knowledge and did not recognize product placement when it was well integrated into the Instagram post of a social media influencer. This shows that the moral panic as expressed by the respondents is not completely justified; they are not in the position to judge someone based on their knowledge when they don’t have the knowledge themselves. However, it also shows how the influence of product placement on Instagram is bigger than the respondents realize. Consumers think they are well informed but in practice they over-estimate their own knowledge. The fact that respondents are not always aware of the promotional purpose of a social media post can be considered misleading, because the respondent assumes the influencer is using a product because he or she genuinely likes the product. A change of the law can therefore be considered favorable, as this will make it clear for consumers when they are confronted with a promotional message.