A Paper on Influencers Reshaping the Consumers Preferences in the Fashion Industry-A Consumer Behaviour Study with an Instagram Perspective

Namitha R

Social Media Influencers, Instagram, Fashion, Product Reviews & Recommendations, Sentiment Analysis, Content Analysis.

This study investigates the work of popular social media influencers and the impact they have on consumer behavior in the fashion segment. The social media influencer forum chosen are specific to Instagram. We seek to understand if the work of an influencer while posting, uploading a video, endorsing or reviewing a product influences the consumer's behaviour in the Fashion segment. The methodology was based on Qualitative research. We conducted the analysis based on Content and Sentiment. We studied the posting patterns of the bloggers and comment styles of consumers on those respective posts for about 2 months. Also, we considered the fan pages created by the users on Instagram for these 6 bloggers. We also focused our research specifically on posts related to fashion as our main scope of this research is about the aforementioned bloggers and their influence on the consumers. Around 250 comments were taken into consideration of 6 bloggers. The main Key performance indicators were based on Engagement and Volume.

From this study our results show that consumers do get affected by the activity of the influencers. We feel this was mainly because people trust people, and not brands.