FROM ENDORSEMENT TO ENGAGEMENT: A CONCEPTUAL REVIEW OF SOCIAL MEDIA INFLUENCER MARKETING LITERATURE

Abstract

Social media influencer marketing started out as a peripheral tactic borrowed from celebrity endorsement and has since grown into a distinct field of its own. This conceptual review follows the underlying academic literature along one organizing line: a shift from an endorsement paradigm, where the endorser is a credible source transferring meaning to a brand, toward an engagement paradigm, where the influencer is a relational actor embedded in an ongoing, interactive exchange with followers. Drawing on source-credibility and meaning-transfer theory, parasocial interaction research, work on authenticity management, sponsorship disclosure, and consumer brand engagement, the review traces how trust, identification, and community have gradually taken over from one-way persuasion as the field's main explanatory mechanisms. It moves through ten themes: the theoretical foundations of endorsement; the rise of the social media influencer as a distinct communicator; parasocial and two-step-flow mechanisms; credibility and trust; the micro- and nano-influencer turn; authenticity management; disclosure and persuasion knowledge; the shift toward consumer engagement; the platformization of the creator economy; and, closing the review, how this theoretical arc plays out in the Indian market, with particular attention to Haryana and the National Capital Region. The review's conclusion is that influencer marketing scholarship has not abandoned endorsement theory so much as built engagement-based, relational constructs on top of it, producing a hybrid conceptual space current theory only partly integrates, and that this hybrid pattern already shows up in emerging Indian evidence even though no study has tested it yet at the level of a single NCR city. Implications for researchers, brand managers, and platform regulators follow, along with an agenda for future regional research.