Disclosure of partnerships between brands and influencers on Instagram: optimization of the framing in the contextof Belgian young women.

Social media influencers are people with a large number of followers on social media. They are creators of content that inspires, entertains or informs. Influencer marketing is a marketing strategy whereby brands contact influencers in order to promote their brand. In exchange for an in-kind or monetary compensation influencers talk about the brand to their audiences. Influencer marketing can take different forms and exists on all social media and is particularly popular on Instagram. Instagram is a picture-sharing app where users share pictures and videos and follow friends, celebrities, influencers and brands. Brands can share content on their accounts but have other options to advertise: Instagram Ads and influencer marketing. In this way, entire marketing campaigns take place on Instagram. This thesis focuses on the specific issue of disclosure of partnerships between brands and influencers on Instagram. Past research showed that disclosing the existence of commercial motivations behind a post could have negative impacts for influencer and brands, but overall, many question marks remain. This raises questions about customer protection. In Belgium, these questions have been addressed through guidelines, but they do not have power of law. The first objective of disclosure should be to protect consumers that might not be aware of influencer marketing strategies behind the content they see on Instagram. While protecting these less informed consumers, the chosen type of disclosure could also mitigate possible negative effects it has on influencers and brands. Among all possible disclosures, three types of clear and conspicuous disclosures are identified for this thesis words like “sponsored”, “ad” or “paid collaboration” with or without hashtags situated in a visible spot in the text under the post; the Instagram branded content tag that states “Paid partnership with ‘brand’”; a narrative explanation about the partnership in the text below the picture. Three fake Instagram posts by a fake influencer about a fake sunglasses brand were made, all identical except for the disclosure that was one of the three options previously identified. They were shown to a sample of Belgian women aged between 18 and 24 (the most represented group among Belgian Instagram users) who were asked to answer questions about these posts with the goal to measure their trust and attitudes toward both the brand and the influencer. Results showed that more explicit disclosures, namely the Instagram branded content tag but even more so the narrative text, had the most positive effects on trust and attitudes. Concerning differences between Walloon and Flemish respondents, there were hints of some variation in their answers but no definite proof that would justify the adaptation of disclosure based on the users being Walloon or Flemish. However, these results cannot be generalized to the population of interest because the research presents two main shortcomings: the scenario was not realistic, and the nature of the collected data limited the options of statistical analysis.