Social Influences and Purchasing

Social influence occurs when one's emotions, opinions, or behaviors are affected by others. Social influence takes many forms and can be seen in conformity, socialization, peer pressure, obedience, leadership, persuasion, sales, and marketing.

In 1958, Harvard psychologist, Herbert Kelman identified three broad varieties of social influence.

• Compliance is when people appear to agree with others but actually keep their dissenting opinions private.
• Identification is when people are influenced by someone who is liked and respected, such as a famous celebrity.
• Internalization is when people accept a belief or behavior and agree both publicly and privately.

Morton Deutsch and Harold Gerard described two psychological needs that lead humans to conform to the expectations of others. These include our need to be right (informational social influence) and our need to be liked (normative social influence). Informational influence (or social proof) is an influence to accept information from another as evidence about reality. Informational influence comes into play when people are uncertain, either because stimuli are intrinsically ambiguous or because there is social disagreement. Normative influence is an influence to conform to the positive expectations of others. In terms of Kelman's typology, normative influence leads to public compliance, whereas informational influence leads to private acceptance.

Social influence is considered an external influence, in terms of consumer behavior. Specific forms of social influence include culture, sub-culture, locality, royalty, ethnicity, family, social class, past experience reference groups, lifestyle, and market mix factors.

Influencer Marketing

In order to take advantage of the effect that social influence has on consumer purchasing behavior, companies have begun to implement a strategy known as influencer marketing. This is a form of marketing in which focus is placed on specific key individuals (or types of individual) rather than the target market as a whole. It identifies the individuals that have influence over potential buyers, and orients marketing activities around these influencers. Influencers may be potential buyers or third parties. These third parties exist either in the supply chain (retailers, manufacturers, etc. ) or may be so-called value-added influencers (such as journalists, academics, industry analysts, professional advisers, and so on).

Influencer marketing is comprised of four main activities:

1. Identifying influencers, and ranking them in order of importance.
2. Marketing to influencers, to increase awareness of the firm within the influencer community.
3. Marketing through influencers, or using influencers to increase market awareness of the firm amongst target markets.
4. Marketing with influencers, turning influencers into advocates of the firm.

Market research techniques can be used to identify influencers, using pre-defined criteria to determine the extent and type of influence. The following are considered types of influencers:

1. Activists: ones who get involved with their communities, political movements, charities and so on.
2. Connected: those having large social networks.
3. Impact: those who are looked up to and are trusted by others.
4. Active minds: those having multiple and diverse interests.
5. Trendsetters: those tending to be early adopters (or leavers) in markets.