An Analysis of the Impact of a Human-like Virtual Influencer Marketing

Abstract

With the generation of “Metaverse” coming, the human-like virtual influencers are increasing rapidly as a marketing communication tool, and more and more brands choose to cooperate with them. However, because virtual influencers have just appeared recently, much remains to be explored to understand how users react to them. Therefore, with the purpose to study the marketing effect of human-like virtual influencers, a comparison has been made between a human-like virtual influencer Rozy and a human influencer Yoona to find whether there is a difference in users’ reactions to them on SNS. Meanwhile, this research also examines the disclosing advertising sponsorship affects the human-like virtual influencer Rozy. As the result, there are two main findings in this research: (1) Although the public’s overall emotional attitude towards Rozy is not as good as that towards Yoona at present, human-like virtual influencer Rozy can increase the engagement of comments; (2) Human-like virtual influencer Rozy has a better performance when disclosing advertising sponsorship compared with human influencer Yoona.