Determinants of Credibility of Virtual Influencers

In today’s digital age, people make use of digital media platforms to interact and ‘influence’ each other on social media (Brown and Hayes, 2007). Social media influencers (SMI) are such users who have attained a celebrity-like status and secured a considerable network of followers by developing engaging content based on expertise in a specific domain, and who directly influence the behavior of their followers (Hearn and Schonhoff, 2016; De Veriman et al., 2017; Ge and Gretzel, 2018). VI, also termed as a virtual celebrity, digital personality, CGI influencer (Mrad et al., 2022), or AI influencer (Thomas and Fowler, 2021) refer to fictional personalities created through computer imagery (Miao et al., 2022). They possess human- like characteristics (Burden and Savin-Baden, 2019), physical features and personality (Moustakas et al., 2020), and indulge in online activity (Hudders et al., 2021; Moustakas et al., 2020). VI exhibit anthropomorphism (Moustakas et al., 2020), ranging from anime-like to almost human-like appearance (Kim et al., 2023), and akin to human influencers, can be effective as they can look and behave like human influencers (Sands et al., 2020). In the case of human SMIs, scholars have adopted the opinion leadership framework to analyze the persuasive traits of an endorser. Katz and Lazersfeld (1955) have highlighted the significant role played by the media spokesperson in persuading audience into use sponsors’ product or services, which they termed as the ‘opinion leader’. Thus, trust in an endorser is of utmost importance. Consumer segments are heterogeneous and factors which contribute or detract viewer trust in VI can also differ. VI phenomena are at the introductory stage in emerging economies like India, and we aim to gain insight on viewers perception of VI as new endorser.