The impact of social media influencers’ bragging language styles on consumers’ attitudes toward luxury brands: The dual mediation of envy and trustworthiness

Abstract

On social media, luxury brand managers often use influencers’ bragging language as a marketing tool. As modesty is considered a virtue in the Chinese context, Chinese influencers tend to adopt a humblebragging language style. Research has examined the impact of bragging language styles on luxury brands and has found that humblebragging, which appears to be modest, has a negative influence on brand attitudes. From the perspective of social comparison theory, we proposed a dual mediation model of malicious envy and trustworthiness to reveal the internal mechanisms and moderating factors of the negative effects of humblebragging. The results of three experiments indicated that compared with straightforward bragging, humblebragging was more likely to elicit malicious envy and lower levels of trust in an influencer, resulting in negative attitudes toward the luxury brand endorsed. Moreover, this negative effect was stronger when the influencer lacked expertise or had high similarity with consumers. Our findings enrich the antecedents of social media influencer marketing and provide managers with implications for maximizing the effectiveness of influencer marketing by matching influencers with word-of-mouth content.

Sharing luxury consumption on social media platforms: Motive inferences and downstream consequences

“…Luxury brands often encourage their customers to post their purchases on social media platforms to generate electronic word‐of‐mouth (Feng et al, 2023). However, sharing luxury brands in a straightforward bragging style or a humblebragging style triggers negative attitudes toward the mentioned luxury brands (Feng et al, 2023).…”

“…Luxury brands often encourage their customers to post their purchases on social media platforms to generate electronic word‐of‐mouth (Feng et al, 2023). However, sharing luxury brands in a straightforward bragging style or a humblebragging style triggers negative attitudes toward the mentioned luxury brands (Feng et al, 2023). This research extends the previous work by revealing how sharing luxury consumption, irrespective of whether it is a material or experiential luxury, can diminish the perceived authenticity of and interpersonal interest in the sharers.…”

“…Consumers post their luxury possessions or experiences on social media to show off their wealth and status or attract new friends (Sekhon et al, 2015). Social media influencers share luxury consumption to construct a persona, trigger admiration, enhance engagement, or lead opinion (Feng et al, 2023). Luxury brands are increasingly relying on social media influencers to generate engagement via word‐of‐mouth (Leban et al, 2021).…”

“…Although posting luxury consumption is pervasive on social media, the actual outcomes of this sharing have hardly been addressed. Clarifying how people make inferences about others' sharing of luxury consumption is crucial because these inferences influence people's impressions of social media users (Valsesia & Diehl, 2022) and the effectiveness of social media influencer marketing (Chung et al, 2023; Feng et al, 2023). While previous research examines inferences drawn from luxury consumption in the context of social interaction, less is known about how people perceive sharing luxury consumption online, and on social media in particular.…”