Influencing the influencers

Abstract

Companies discovered throughout the years that in order to acquire, retain or grow clients, they should allow customers to take a more active role in the product or service creation. Customers have become so valued by companies that they are now considered as partners in co-creation and co-selling. This is reflected in social shopping communities where consumers connect to each other and share, discover, rate, recommend and purchase products. This act of peer-to-peer influencing is becoming crucial to brands especially when it is conducted on retailers' own social networking sites, such as on Amazon's Spark platform. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to examine influencers' effects on social shopping within retailers' social platforms. Based on a qualitative approach, 15 experts were interviewed to shed light on the underlying factors surrounding social shopping that is affected by influencers within a retailer's networking platform. The paper consequently suggests the needed strategies to be adopted by brands and retailers alike.