Placement Prominence and Cultural Influence: Their Roles in Shaping Brand Attitudes and Purchase Intentions in the Chinese Market

Influencer marketing, also known as influencer product placement, has gained increasing attention and has been widely researched in the past years with the prevalence of the Internet, the fast process of digitalization, and the evolving nature of social media platforms. Brands are increasingly counting on influencer marketing to reach target consumers and achieve their marketing strategies because consumers are losing patience with traditional advertising channels, such as TV ads and mass media. However, past studies led to inconsistent results regarding the efficacy of the prominence of product placement and influencer marketing. At the same time, while influencer marketing has been widely researched, most of the past research focused on developed Western countries, and the Chinese market drew relatively less attention compared to other countries. Nowadays, there are many foreign influencers posting actively on Chinese social media, and these foreign influencers gain 25.6 thousand euros per month for product placement, making collaboration with foreign influencers a popular trend. However, the efficacy of foreign influencer marketing has never been studied before, plus the inconsistency of the results of influencer marketing. Thus, it is important to investigate how influencer product placement influences consumer behaviors, such as brand attitude and purchase intention. Our study elaborates on the following question: to what extent do the level of prominence of the product placement and the cultural background of influencers influence consumers’ brand attitude and purchase intention? To measure the impact of influencer marketing, an experiment was conducted among Chinese social media users. We made 6 videos with different prominence levels of product placement and influencers with different cultural backgrounds, and we presented different videos randomly to different groups. The results suggest that influencer product placement has a positive effect on brand attitude and purchase intention compared to groups without any placement, but the level of prominence does not impact brand attitude and purchase intention. The cultural background of influencers does not significantly impact Chinese consumers’ brand attitude or purchase intention. There is no interaction effect between the level of prominence of product placement and the cultural background of influencers on brand attitude and purchase intention. The findings of our study provide a basis for future research that seeks to elaborate on the effectiveness of influencer marketing in the Chinese market. We advocate future research to further explore the cultural aspect to fill the gaps of research in this area and to keep the findings updated in this fast- paced and constantly evolving world.