"Do you want to be on my Instagram?" - A qualitative study of how companies collaborate with influencers

Sammanfattning: Influencer marketing is booming among marketing practitioners across the globe. Only in Sweden the spend on influencer marketing was 660 million SEK in 2017, a 33 percent increase from previous year and a proof of the strong interest. However, little research has explored how companies actually work with influencers. The purpose of this study is to understand how companies collaborate with influencers, by investigating the characteristics of influencer collaborations. In order to achieve this, a qualitative study including 19 semi-structured interviews with participants working with influencer marketing was conducted. To gather an overall picture of the collaborations, we interviewed participants from three groups of actors often involved in the collaborations: companies, influencer intermediaries and influencers. With support from celebrity endorsement theory and network theory, we find that having a suitable fit between the brand and the influencer is essential to achieve a successful collaboration. In order to reach a suitable fit, companies evaluate factors such as credibility, meaning transfer, virtuous attractiveness, data and personal relations. Furthermore, our study shows that companies have not yet developed clear processes for how they work in the collaborations, the set up often varies which indicates that clear roles have not yet been established. Building relationships to the influencers are however found to be of importance.