The impact of influencers on the companies reputation in developing countries: Case of Morocco

Abstract

With the emergence of social networks and their adoption by a large number of users, the importance of influencers continues to grow and companies are in a frantic race to recruit those most likely to promote their reputation and brand image. However, in the existing literature, there is little work that conducts quantitative studies on this subject in developing countries. For this reason, we conducted a study that attempts to understand the importance of influencers in reshaping public opinion of a company or brand. We chose as a subject of study a large Moroccan company operating in the telecommunications sector that hired a popular influencer among young Moroccans. We then adopted an approach based on scraping and analyzing the occurrences of the influencer's posts on Instagram and the content of the company's website and then publishing a questionnaire to 180 respondents in the age range of most of the followers of the influencer in question. The results suggest that a positive relationship exists between the influencer and brand reputation, meaning that if the person is following the influencer who has published content on the brand, that person is expected to be systematically aware of the brand, and vice versa.