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ABSTRACT
Influencer marketing has become a powerfull way to influence consumers attitudes and decisions in choosing products or services they buy based on the recommendations of followed online influencers. From its beginning the influencer marketing started in the fashion industry but has spread to diverse industries such as travel and tourism. The aim of the paper is to see whether travel influencers have an effect on their followers when choosing travel destinations that is to see whether consumer behaviorus are influcenced by social media influencers. For the purpose of this research a literature review was done searching two relevant databases; Web of Science and Scopus, using the search term ("influencer marketing") AND ("travel" AND ("tourism"). The objective of this literature review was i) to explore the field of influencer marketing and its effects on travel and tourism industry and ii) to provide an overview of the research literature in these areas. The results of the research indicate that there is a growing interest in the use of influencer marketing as a strategy tool to promote destination tourism and to induce customers travel intention. Analysed papers research relations of different factors like credibility, trust, attractiveness, expertise, information quality or ethics of social media influencers in gaining consumer trust and their intention to travel or chooose the promoted destination.
Keywords: infuencer, influencer marketing, travel, tourism industry
1.INTRODUCTION
The report of a leading marketing company, eMarketer, published a report how digital marketing increases year by year by almost 20%. This is specially visible in the retail industry of Germany, since this industry represents a leader in spending on digital marketing. The report states that in 2021, retail industry in Germany will spend €2,26 billions on digital ads representing 23,8% of the national total (eMarketer, https://www.emarketer.com/ content/germany-digital-ad-spending-by-industry-2021). Bearing in mind the fact that ten years ago, digital advertising represented only 10% of total expenses of one company and 90% was spent on analog advertising this is a big turn in marketing strategy of a companies (Levin,2020). The fact is that nowadays we are bombarded by social media and many people are informed through social media on a daily basis. Almost half of surveyed Twitter users did buy something because of an influencer's tweet (Karp 2016, Lou and Yuan,...