Social Media Influencer Marketing in an Emerging Market: The Case of Moroccan Millennial Consumers

Social media platforms assist and empower consumers throughout their consumer behavior journey allowing interaction, personalization and engagement. The platforms offer different tools for social media advertising with influencer marketing being one of the most popular that requires the collaboration of influencers and brands. Social media influencers are regular individuals that create and disseminate a digital narrative of their everyday lives. Increasingly, brands identify and strategically engage with influencers to enable favorable brand outcomes. Existing academic research on social media influencer research focuses mainly on western countries to explore the phenomenon. The concentration on a specific geographical context necessitates the study of social media effectiveness in different cultural contexts. By employing qualitative research in Morrocco, the present study explores influencer-follower interactions and their effect on consumers’ behavior by focusing on a specific age segment – the digital native millennials. The paper provides theoretical insights on how cultural dimensions can create differences in millennials’ perceptions and consumption behaviors by offering also managerial implications for influencers and brands, and areas for future research.