The role of influencers in developing marketing strategy in the field of beauty and fashion spheres based on the example of the Russian market

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The role of influencers in developing marketing strategy in the field of beauty and fashion spheres based on the example of the Russian market.

Arina Yaroshevich

Daria Bragina

Valeriya Deryabina

Introduction

The impact of influencers in Russia in the fashion and beauty spheres has not been sufficiently studied yet. The most popular brand platform for influencers is Instagram, which is used by 78% of opinion leaders around the world (Casalу, Flaviбn & Ibбсez-Sбnchez, 2018). The number of active Instagram users is growing, for example the number of paid advertising posts of opinion leaders has more than doubled (from 9.7 to 21.7 million 2016 to 2018) (Backaler, 2019). 320 new influencer marketing-focused platforms and agencies entered the market over the last 12 months (Statista, 2020). Back in 2015, there were just 190 influencer platforms and agencies. This grew to 335 in 2016, 420 in 2017, and 740 in 2018 - more than twice the number that existed just two years previously (Backaler, 2019). Now millennials dominate as a target audience in the opinion leaders' space but entering the market by generation Z involves changes in the situation in the context of Instagram sales, as genzers prefer to shop online. All these factors contribute to the fast-changing situation in the online market. Russia is not an exception. The global influencer marketing landscape is developing quickly, but differently. Backaler, 2019 claims that a lot of potential for influencer marketing in emerging markets across Eastern Europe and Asia: “The engagement rates of influencers in Russia, for example, are seven times higher than the average engagement rate in Europe.” This study intends to examine the importance of influencers for the effectiveness of the marketing strategy in modern conditions in the field of fashion and beauty in Russia.

Taking into consideration all mentioned above research question of the study is the following: “What is the significance of influencers when building a marketing strategy for fashion and beauty brands?” To answer this question, an exploratory study will be conducted. The main purpose is to examine the efficiency of influencers' performance as a tool of marketing strategy in the field of beauty and fashion industries on the Russian market. The hypotheses of the study are:

H1: Russian influencers and bloggers are mostly followed by the audience on Instagram and YouTube.

H2: Cosmetics and clothing advertising is trusted more when it is advertised by bloggers with a similar product profile theme.

H3: Instagram users first of all rely mostly on the influencers' opinion and their adds before the purchasing.

H4: The main reason for following influencers and media personalities is original, interesting, and useful content.

Both qualitative and quantitative methods are used to study the theme. To answer the research question secondary data analysis, survey, and in-depth interviews are conducted. One of the main limitations may be the low number of responses to the survey. Backaler (2019) reports that the number of responses to mail questionnaires can be as low as 20%. Nowadays, there is so much spam in the mail that people often don't open emails that are sent to them by unknown senders. In addition, respondents often fill out questionnaires in an illegible manner or skip questions, which affects the quality of the data received. Moreover, the personal qualities of the interviewer may influence the results of the in-depth interviews. This may be due to the interviewer's characteristics: gender, race, clothing style, etc. Finally, in-depth interviews and survey were conducted remotely in connection with the current situation with coronavirus in the world for everyone's comfort and safety.

This study could be applied in marketing, management and cross-cultural communications. The obtained research data would be useful to marketing and production agencies, managers and marketers of brands (Kamboj, Sarmah, Gupta & Dwivedi, 2018). The results of the study can be used by brand managers, PR and sales managers since influencers directly affect the brand reputation, and therefore managerial decisions on collaboration with influencers have corresponding risks, which can be reduced by choosing an influencer that is suitable for the philosophy and policy of the brand (Backaler, 2019). For public relations specialists, this study will be useful for efficient brand interaction with influencers, as the study provides insights into the behavior trends of online media content creators (Dhanesh & Duthler, 2019).

There are some essential terms, which will be used regularly in this research paper:

· Influencer: a well-known person who can influence the opinions of members of the target community (Backaler, 2019).

· Levels of Influence: while people try to simply call everyone with an online community an “influencer,” it's more informative to first break down influencers by their audience size to classify them as either Celebrity Influencer, Category Influencer (emerging or established), or Micro-Influencer and normalize audience size to account for fake followers (Solis, 2017).

· Roles of Influence: depending on how an individual engages with a company, they can assume different roles of influence. Glossier illustrates how influencers with various-sized audiences can be incorporated throughout the product development life cycle to deliver meaningful business impact (Backaler, 2019).

· Influencer ABCCs: When seeking to collaborate with influencers, companies need to take into account the influencer's perspective, especially related to authenticity, brand ft, community (Reach, Resonance, Relevance), and content (Backaler, 2019).

· Brand Fit: A consistent personal brand is critical for an influencer to gain more and more influence, but the influencer needs to balance their personal brand that sometimes comes at odds with the company brands they want to collaborate with (Backaler, 2019).

· Community: A targeted, engaged, and growing community is the ultimate measure of success for an influencer (Weiss, 2016).

· Content: Content is how an influencer adds value to and builds a relationship with their community (Weiss, 2016).

· Influencer's credibility: The quality of being believable or trustworthy (Backaler, 2019).

· Micro-influencers are individuals that have between 1,000 to 1,000,000 followers/audience members and are considered experts in their respective niche (Boerman, S., 2020).

· SMM: Social media marketing (SMM) is a form of Internet marketing that utilizes social networking websites as a marketing tool. The goal of SMM is to produce content that users will share with their social network to help a company increase brand exposure and broaden customer reach (Dhanesh, G., &Duthler, G., 2019).

· SEO: The process of optimizing a website. SEO requires an understanding of how search engines work, what people search for, and why and how people search. Successful SEO makes a site appealing to users and search engines. It is a combination of technical and marketing tools (Backaler, 2019).

· UGC: Literally, user-generated content (UGC) is translated as a content that is generated by people. UGC refers to everything created by the brand's audience - both regular reviews and the production of special videos. The company can use content from users for its own purposes: publish it on the site, in social networks to promote the brand and increase customer loyalty. As practice shows, UGC gives more effect than ordinary, even high-quality content (Backaler, 2019).

· Omni-channel marketing: Omni-channel marketing is an approach that intends to provide customers with a completely integrated shopping experience from the first step to the last. This means that each of the all channels works together to create a single message and brand image for the company (Weiss, 2016).

· Social Commerce: Social commerce sells products directly through social media networks. It differs from social media marketing as it is not redirecting users to an online store but offering them the ability to checkout directly within the network they're using at that moment (Dhanesh, G., &Duthler, G., 2019).

· Native advertising: Native advertising is the way to pay attention to the particular brand in the context of the site and user interests. It is perceived as part of the site being viewed, takes into consideration the site's features. Native advertising is not identified as an add and does not cause the audience to reject it. Such a kind of advertising is "woven" into the mainstream of information content. The goal of native advertising is to create a more natural and less intrusive advertising message to increase the number of clicks, sales, and other targeted actions (Boerman, S., 2020).

· Advertising: Any paid form of non-personal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods, or services by an identified sponsor (Turban E., Strauss J., Lai L., 2016).

The objectives, which define the purpose of the thesis are the following: new in-depth knowledge in the field of marketing and management, understanding of the construction of a marketing strategy and the role of influencers in it, skill of analyzing a great amount of secondary data, ability to isolate the essential information and talk about complex things in a clear language. skills of working with statistical data analysis, practice in interview preparation and its analysis.

To achieve the objectives some tasks of the thesis were completed. Examining the scientific literature was helpful to gain the skill of secondary data analysis and writing a theoretical part contribute to the ability of isolation of the essential information and talking about complex things in a clear and understandable way. Also, it taught to summarize and analyze in a critical way theory, which is relevant for the issue that the research focuses on, to identify the most essential theoretical issues relevant for the theme of the research and to use theoretical background to develop a foundation for the empirical analyses in the study. Moreover, precise analysis of the secondary data broadens the horizons in the sphere of marketing and management field. Drawing up a survey and analyzing the data obtained by it helped to master the SPSS and Excel tools better. What is more, the need of visualizing statistical data motivates to develop skills of working with visualization programs such as Tableau Public. Creating an interview protocol and its conducting contribute to the skill of interviewing, negotiating online and protocol coding, which is extremely applicable in academic and scientific researches.

The structure of the research thesis consists of abstract, table of contents, introduction, theoretical part, research question statement, methodology, description of the results, limitations and future research, conclusion, references and appendices. There are 65 pages in this study. It is based on thirty-seven references. The abstract describes the main problem, research gap, goals, hypotheses, main methods and anticipated results. Also, keywords connected with the research are included in the abstract. The introduction consists of a detailed description of the study's background, problem statement and proposal solution to this problem. Besides, research objectives, limitations and terms' definitions are included to a better understanding of the study. The literature review is dedicated to the clarification of the research gap, which is not fulfilled in the previous literature and which our research is going to close. The part of the research question statement consists of specifying the research question which the study is focused on. Also, research objectives and tasks for achieving the objectives are described. Moreover, the specification, development of the hypotheses and the justification of the methods used in the research are discussed. The relationship between the research question, hypotheses and the theoretical foundation is explained, limitations are discussed. Next, the methodology is following. In this part of the bachelor's thesis methods of the survey are described precisely. Finally, the part of the results and conclusion part narrates about results from the data analysis, its explanation, and application, summarize the main points of the future study and comments on the importance and benefits of the study.

1. Literature review

Influencers: Who are they and why do brands prefer to collaborate with them?

Modern consumers in the decision to purchase are influenced by social networks. Recently, visual social networks have begun to replace textual ones; more and more people prefer visual to textual content on social networks. It is worth noting that, as such, the world of social media began to spread to everyday life and go beyond the presence of online. The changes affected not only consumer behaviorbut also marketing. The emergence of influencers and content makers forms a new culture, as well as its many followers who listen to them. Along with the promotion of using celebrities, the involvement of local brands with influential individuals have been actively used in marketing as they are considered reliable sources of information among its subscribers, and their opinion is valuable, and therefore, is an effective way to attract new customers (Appel et al., 2020).

In the past few years, there has been a trend in digital marketing associated with the use of Instagram as a tool for promoting products through influencers (Casalу, Flaviбn & Ibбсez-Sбnchez, 2018). Modern channels of online brand promotion are becoming increasingly important as a way of influencing the target audience, as well as the formation of values, preferences and trends. That is why promotion specialists are constantly looking for effective communication options that allow them to interact with target groups. Due to existing trends, visual content is becoming a powerful tool for this influence. Visual content has several advantages over text, and especially when it comes to promoting the fashion and beauty products industry. Visual content is processed by people faster than text, and also causes a wider range of emotions. The growth, importance and effectiveness of the use of visual content in promotion activities are due to the fact that this type of information transfer is better perceived and allows to quickly convey a communication message to the target audience.

In connection with the development of information technologies, especially computers and smartphones, the modern user receives a huge amount of information from various sources, which has affected the ability to perceive them. At present, the selection of material for further detailed reading is based on a quick preview in which only a visual accompaniment can draw attention to the information. Therefore, data visualization has gained enormous importance today (Rietveld et al., 2020). Instagram is one of the most popular social networks in Russia and as for December 2019, has 43.67 million users (Statista, 2020). The use of Instagram over 5 years has increased 10 times, Instagram announced that the daily users' performance in June 2018 reached 1 billion ("The State of Influencer Marketing 2019: Benchmark Report [+Infographic]", 2020). Regarding age groups, Instagram is most popular worldwide among people aged 18-24 years (30%) and 25-34 years (35%) (Statista, 2020), which makes the platform potentially attractive for promoting goods and services aimed at an audience of young and middle age. Influential women control the space of influencer marketing owned by 84% of the industry. In contrast, Instagram's total global user base is 52% female and 48% male ("2019 Influencer Marketing Report", 2020). It was revealed that the intention to use Instagram is positively related to the simplicity of the interface, social identity, usefulness and pleasure (Nedra et al., 2019). Instagram is now the network of choice for influential marketing campaigns. After analyzing the responses of representatives of marketing agencies, brands and relevant experts in the field of marketing, it was possible to find examples regarding the use of influencer marketing. 79% of respondents believe that Instagram is important for their influencer marketing campaigns. Dominance on Instagram is even more pronounced if looking at the numbers. 653 respondents claim that they mainly use Instagram for influential marketing ("The State of Influencer Marketing 2019: Benchmark Report [+Infographic]", 2020). Media agencies are convinced that with regard to brand communication, Instagram will be used more often than other social networks in the next few years. In recent years, visual content rather than textual has been preferred for communication. Marketers integrate social media into their marketing strategies to reach potential buyers as much as possible. CMO Survey in 2018 showed that advertising and promotion of brands on social networks accounts for more than 13% of the total budget of the marketing strategy of companies (Voorveld, 2019). Based on current statistics, attracting influencers for promotion has become an integral part of the marketing strategy of successful brands. The topic concerning the role of the influencers is quite new and relevant in the field of scientific research of modern marketing issues in the digital sphere. Influencers exist on many platforms, they are usually divided into Youtubers, Instagrammers and bloggers. The latter are usually present on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook (Backaler, 2019).

Celebrity endorsement is an effective method for marketers to promote their brands, products, and services by transferring the positive image of a celebrity on their brand. Nowadays besides using “typical celebrities” such as actors, models, etc., companies increasingly start to use social media influencers, such as vloggers and `Instafamous' people. The preference for brand collaboration with influencers is mainly due to the fact that followers are easier to associate themselves with influencers than celebrities. (Schouten, Janssen & Verspaget, 2019). Following influencers, constantly observing their lives through social networks, the subscriber creates an illusory feeling of closeness and friendship. And since influencers often ask the opinions of their subscribers and interact with them through surveys and comments, this relationship of affinity develops precisely with influencers, and not with generally accepted celebrities (Boerman, 2020).

To be effective marketing tool, an influencer has to be credible, able to evoke such feelings as similarity and wishful identification. Visuality of the advertised product and identification of the potential consumer with the influencer are factors that positively influence the promotion of fashion products and the purchase intention (Schouten, Janssen & Verspaget, 2019). All sponsored posts on Instagram were analyzed in 2019. The main findings were related to sponsorship posts such as #ad, which meant collaboration between the brand and an influential person. The survey identified more than 3 million sponsored posts around the world in 2019, an increase of 48% compared to sponsored contributions in 2018 ("2019 Influencer Marketing Report", 2020). In one of the marketing research in 2018, it was revealed that 76 percent of consumers purchased a product or service after watching a video. Moreover, 85% of them are between 18 and 34 years old (Business Wire, 2018). In 2019, the top 3 spheres on Instagram, which use stories from the #ad cross-analysis and mentions in stories, showed that 25% of all sponsored stories feature a beauty brand ("2019 Influencer Marketing Report", 2020). Fashion is a tangible and visible industry that require visualization, which may explain the tendency to use Instagram to promote apparel (Schouten, Janssen & Verspaget, 2019). The top 5 industries that partnered with influencers in 2019 are: Fashion, Travel, Fitness, Beauty and Art. Fashion, Travel, and Fitness are the leading influencer categories, making up 16% of the industry ("2019 Influencer Marketing Report", 2020). The development of influencing marketing in these industries allows brands and marketing agenciesto choose among influential people for cooperation and promotion of goods and services ("2019 Influencer Marketing Report", 2020).

The audience of influencers has consumer behavioral intentions related to fashion trends more if the opinion leader publishes original and unique content in his account. Prominent advertising publications, which do not correspond to the lifestyle and nature of the content of the influencer itself have a negative impact on buying intention. In other words, if a brand promotes through an opinion leader an inappropriate product to its image and the nature of its account, then the audience reacts negatively to such posts. Moreover, the behavior of influencers is changing nowadays, especially with regard to posting, their number is fallingsince a high-quality post requires time and effort (Casalу, Flaviбn & Ibбсez-Sбnchez, 2018).

Today, co-creation of products and collaboration with the brand among influencers is most common in the fashion and beauty industries. Regarding the cosmetics industry and social media marketing, brands such as MAC Cosmetics and Sephora developed cosmetics with popular beauty influencers. Subsequently, the released products were among the best-selling. Customers themselves are convinced that influencers convey the wishes of brand customers, and they are better versed in cosmetics than the usual celebrities (Backaler, 2019). In addition, cosmetic brands are now collaborating with influencers, especially those who create content on YouTube and Instagram, offering them collaboration not only online, but also to appear in commercials on television. Since the beauty community is quite large specifically on YouTube, beauty content makers have great power to influence their subscribers, which encourages brands to collaborate. Based on existing research, it is clear that the collaboration of YouTube influencers of beauty together with cosmetic brands increases brand awareness, and the high level of feedback from subscribers gives brands directives to improve their strategies for working with influencers (Genз & Цksьz, 2019). Moreover, previous studies show that promoting products using a review on a platform such as YouTube using influencers is more effective than using familiar advertising (Nandagiri & Philip, 2018). In 2019, 25% of all advertising-sponsored stories on Instagram are cosmetic beauty brands ("2019 Influencer Marketing Report", 2020). Reviews of brand products in the form of media content, posted by influencers on social networks, have a greater impact on brand opinion among potential buyers, even sponsored posts or non-professionally shot influencer content are more likable on Instagram than professional advertising. In fact, as the cost of influencers is becoming an increasingly prominent budget item for companies -- and the fashion, luxury and cosmetics industries are now experiencing a bit of a micro-influencer boom -- brands will have to become more selective about the digital professionals with whom they enter cooperation to get the most out of the brand investment (Sokolova & Kefi, 2020).

Sometimes it becomes difficult for followers to distinguish sponsored influencer content from non-sponsored. This is due to the fact that influencers constantly share the details of their lives and express opinions regarding a variety of issues, products or food establishments that they visit (Stubb & Colliander, 2019). It was revealed that the disclosure of sponsored content affects the future intention to purchase a particular brand product. Thus, the marked posts, as sponsored, increase brand awareness and put it in the memory of the followers. In order to create and implement a successful marketing strategy involving influential people to promote the brand, marketers should pay attention to the fact that online behavior should not be intrusive, as this will only discourage the audience from wanting to buy an advertised product or service (Okazaki, Schuberth, Tagashira & Andrade, 2019).

Advertising campaigns are dominated by niche influencers, with 90% of all brand partnerships coming from micro-influencers. Micro-influencers usually create niche content for a very engaged audience at a relatively affordable rate. The results of the research showed that 89% of all sponsored posts in the channels received up to 1,000 Like-per-post ratings, indicating the degree of impact ("2019 Influencer Marketing Report", 2020). Advertising with micro-influencers and macro-influencers actually increases brand awareness and purchase intention. Money is not important for them, micro-influencers need to advertise what they believe in. Celebrities and influencers with more than a million followers usually prefer large companies that care about reach and recognition. Before working with influencers, a brand needs to study its audience, because the number of followers does not always mean that the person is influential in reality. Interaction with followers, the level of engagement, the number of likes and previous successful cooperation with brands are the factors that indicate that it is worth considering cooperation with this blogger. The influencer should share the policy and philosophy of the brand with which cooperation takes place, because this discrepancy may not bring positive results in the future. Collaboration with influencers for a brand is a kind of risk associated with the company's reputation. Therefore, it is so important to choose a creative blogger who can direct his or her efforts and create content that is suitable for the brand philosophy and at the same time does not contradict with own style of account management.

Customization of clothes is in great demand now. More and more buyers want to show not only knowledge of trends through clothes, but also their values. So, customization has become a real find for millennials, who always broadcast their inner world through clothes. This trend began to integrate brands into their marketing strategies, attracting influencers to create products. Collaborations in the creation of clothing and cosmetics product lines are in demand not only among the influencer audience but also help to expand potential brand buyers and to make long-term customer relations with the brand (Backaler, 2019).Now brands are paying more attention to social responsibility online and are trying in every possible way to increase their reputation. Attracting not only canonized models to advertising campaigns, but also lush models, as well as influencers who transmit similar values ??to their followers. Brands are introducing a strategy in which the identification of potential buyers with the brand becomes almost the main goal. When a potential client sees that the brand's face is not only top models, but also ordinary people with their own shortcomings, this draws more attention to the problem of self-acceptance in society and also increases the attractiveness of the brand for women of all sizes, nationalities and ages (Maсas-Viniegra et al., 2019).

Followers themselves are mostly convinced that micro-influencers, unlike macro-influencers, will not abuse the confidence of their audience and endorse low-quality brand products, for fear of harming their reputation. In addition to the fact that brands do not advertise but lay in the minds of the masses the need for their products, brands are moving away from collaboration with major bloggers. The bitter experience when an influencer advertises a brand and led to a loss of loyalty from the audience of such bloggers. But brands suffer no less from this, therefore they prefer to contact micro-bloggers with the number of followers up to 50-100 thousand, if talking about Instagram. Firstly, the audience of this influencer believes the information received. Secondly, such a blogger is not yet spoiled with gifts and offers of brands, which means that it is easier to negotiate with such an influencer (Djafarova & Rushworth, 2017). The use of influencers increases the recognition of local brands whose clothes or shoes are noted in the publication together with the clothes of large national brands. This allows to increase audience reach and increases the number of purchases made for local brands (Hsiao et al., 2020).

2. Statement of the research question

The topic about the role of the influencers is quite new and relevant in the field of scientific research of modern marketing issues in digital sphere. This research paper examines the latest researches and tools in the field of influencers and their impact on modern culture, brand promotion and perception by different generations.

Thereby research question of the study is the following: “What is the significance of influencers when building a marketing strategy for fashion and beauty brands?” To answer this question, the exploratory study was conducted.

The research objectives which defines the purpose of the thesis are: new precise knowledge in the sphere of marketing and management, understanding of the marketing strategy and the role of influencers as a tool for promotion in it, skill of analyzing a big amount of secondary data and to isolate the important information, ability to narrate about complex things in a clear scientific language, skills of processing statistical data, practice in interview preparation and its analysis, competency of visualizing the data.

To achieve these objectives the research tasks were complete. Firstly, examine of the scientific literature was helpful to develop the skill of secondary data analysis. Writing the theoretical background contribute to the ability of isolation of the important information and narrating about complex things in a clear and understandable way. Also it taught to summarize and analyze in a critical way theory, which is relevant for the research theme, to identify the most essential theoretical issues relevant for the theme of the research and to use theoretical part for the development of the foundation for the empirical analysis in the study. Moreover, precise analysis of the secondary data broadens the competencies in the sphere of marketing and management field. Drawing up a survey and processing the data obtained by it helped to master the SPSS and Excel tools in a better way. The need of visualizing a statistical data motivate to develop stills of working with visualization programs such as Tableau Public. Finally, compiling an interview protocol and its future conducting contribute to the skill of interviewing, negotiating in the online format and protocol coding, what is quite an applicable competency not only for the academic and scientific researches, but for the future career too.

We used three research methods: secondary data analysis, survey and in-depth interviews. Usually marketing research starts with the collection of secondary data. Secondary data is the basis for this research, and it speeds up process, allowing researchers to identify main problems and solutions of the topic, analyze previous research methods, helped to advance scientific hypotheses and form in-depth interview guide. Secondary data analysis is a necessary part of every study, and this one is not an exception. The sources of secondary data for these researches are publications of international official organizations, international statistical publications, publications of educational, journals, researches, design institutes and public research organizations, electronic databases, Internet websites, scientific books and articles.

Next the researchers want to understand what the situation with influencers is is on the Russian market and complete descriptive statistics. The survey was chosen as a method to get the data and to visualized it. The aim was to know the attitudes of key target audience of influencers and marketing/PR agencies/brands about social networks, advertisement at social networks and about influencers in common. The online questionnaire consists of questions measuring demographic variables, questions measuring social media usage, social media intensity, behavioral intention, ad recognition, influencer-follower relationship. SPSS and Excel were used to process the results. Also, respondents were asked about the overall perceptions of opinion leaders (Ganga S. Dhanesh, Gaelle Duthler, 2019). To operationalize our results, the tools used in this method were adapted from the foreign literature.

The hypotheses of the study are based on literature review and are the following:

H1: Russian influencers and bloggers are mostly followed by the audience in Instagram and YouTube (Backaler, 2019).

H2: Cosmetics and clothing advertising is trusted more when it is advertised by bloggers with a similar product profile theme (Sokolova, K., Kef H. 2019).

H3: Instagram users first of all rely mostly on the influencers' opinion and their adds before the purchasing (Sokolova, K., Kef H. 2019).

H4: The main reason for following influencers and media personalities is original, interesting and useful content (Luis V. Casalуa, Flaviбnb C., Ibбсez-Sбnchez S., 2018).

Finally, last but not least the in-depth interview is the following (Djafarova Е., Rushworth, 2017). This this study was used as a qualitative research method to meet the research objectives. The aim was to provide a greater understanding of the role, pitfalls, problems, effectiveness and perspectives of influence marketing in Russia. In qualitative research, the goal is rarely to arrive at statistically-valid conclusions, rather to gain insights and build theory (Bryman, 2015). In-depth interviews were used to explore the meanings behind working with influencers companies' representatives' discussion (Bryman, 2015; Chua & Chang, 2016). The method is very flexible since it can be used both as an independent method and in combination with qualitative and quantitative methods (any type of survey). Blocks of questions in the interview protocol were conducted based on secondary data analysis to get wide and deep insights, which will answer the research question and solve the problem, which has not been solved yet.

3. Methodology

In the research, the team used mixed methods to study the role of influencers: both qualitative and quantitative. Qualitative research, namely semi-structured in-depth interviews helped answer the question of role and as a result, the team got insights: information about values and motives of using influencers in marketing strategies of companies. The survey helped researchers understand the effectiveness of using such marketing channel as influencers.

Secondary data analysis

Almost every marketing research starts with the collection of secondary data. Secondary data is the basis for this research, and it speeds up process, allowing researchers to identify questions that need to be asked conducting in-depth interviews.

In this research, the sources of secondary data are publications of international official organizations, international statistical publications, publications of educational, journals, researches, design institutes and public research organizations, electronic databases, Internet websites, scientific books and articles.

The results of the secondary data analysis helped to advance scientific hypotheses, understand the relevance, to form in-depth interview guide. In this research, the questionnaire is a continuation of in-depth interviews, but with a different sample. Fortunately for the researchers, it turned out nowadays the study of the role of influencers in the marketing strategy of companies in Russia is relevant. Few marketers write and talk about the role.

The survey was chosen as a method to get the additional data about influence marketing for Russian Federation, to visualized it and to form descriptive statistics, which will help to conduct the interview protocol at the next step. The aim was to know the attitudes of key target audience of influencers and marketing/PR agencies/brands about social networks, advertisement at social networks and about influencers in common. All the respondents for the survey are Instagram users from Russian Federation, which were found in this social network by the method of “snowball”.

Based on the research format, the team decided to use the snowball method to contact with potential respondents. The method is based on the fact that almost every representative of the target group can name one or more people who belong to this group. Therefore, the researchers look for the first respondents, and they, in turn, suggest who else could be a part of the sample. As a result, the number of respondents is growing like a snowball (Naderifar, Goli & Ghaljaie, 2017). This appropriate method will givehigh completeness and reliability of responses and high speed of work. The disadvantage of this method and its limitation is the distortion of the sample since the respondents would be people from the same companies. Therefore, the "chain" of one person will need to be limited in number.

A survey is a method of collecting primary verbal information (Loginova, Dergunova & Melnikov, 2015). In this research, survey contains 17 questions to reduce the risk of failure to fill out the questionnaire and reduce the responsiveness of respondents. The survey consists of three parts: introduction, main part and details of respondents. Age and gender helped the research team make a demographic division and analyze the data in more detail. The survey contained only semi-closed questions with the option to enter an answer if it differs from the proposed options to increase the likelihood of respondents passing it. However, this also increased the percentage of random responses. To avoid this, the team used a double question. It is the same question at the beginning and at the end of the questionnaire, which was formulated similarly or differently and carry the same semantic load. A different answer to this question helped the researchers identify randomly completed application forms and not process false data. The collected data was encoded in Excel using and processed by contingency table, analysis of frequencies using the SPSS Statistics to test the hypotheses.

The research team followed the following rules when forming the survey:

? clear terminology in the survey text;

? the sequence of questions should be logical and interesting for the respondents;

? difficult or personal questions should be asked at the end of survey or should be omitted;

? each question should be checked;

? forming questions requires care, awareness, and thoroughness.

All respondents will have the opportunity to take only an electronic version of survey because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The research team conducted a pre-test of the survey before launching it in the sample.

The research is cross-sectional. The study can be undertaken in which data is gathered just once, perhaps over a period of days or weeks or months, in order to answer a research question. The sample size was 384 respondents because the respondents of the questionnaire are the Russian target audience (followers), generation Z and millennials. The confidence interval for this sample is ±5%. The sample consisted of young people mostly female from 18 to 35. (Statista, 2020).

The in-depth interview method is very flexible since it can be used both as an independent method and in combination with qualitative and quantitative methods.

When investigating the role of influencers, the team wanted to get such results as attitudes to influencers, reaction, hidden information, and value from marketing agencies, photo and video production companies and entrepreneurs. The insights received are not statistical, but they point out the pitfalls that lie behind the use of influencers in companies' marketing strategies.

One of the main steps in preparing for in-depth interviews is to draw up a protocol with questions that will help researchers get relevant results for the study. The questions in the Protocol of in-depth interviews were formulated on the basis of secondary data analysis and descriptive statistics for the Russian influencers market.

The interview protocol contains only open questions. In the case of this research, the protocol was divided into blocks, each of which related to a specific sub-topic of the study.

10 open questions were divided into 3 sections:

? “general questions”;

? “the use of influencers in marketing strategy”;

? “the advantages and disadvantages of working with influencers”.

Each section had its own value in this study. “General questions” were necessary for general information about the respondent and his/her company. In this section, the goal was to win the Respondent over in order to get more insights in the next blocks. For example, this section contained the following questions:

? How many years have you been working in fashion/beauty sphere?

? How do you think the channels of promotion have changed over the years of your work and why?

? What promotion channels do you use?

The next section combined the issues that were key in this study: identifying the criteria for selecting influencers for projects and their effectiveness. “Use of influencers in marketing strategies” section contained the following questions:

? In which cases does the use of influencers effectively affect the marketing strategy?

? For what target audience does your company usually use influencers and why?

? What are the criteria for selecting an influencer for a specific project?

? What do you think, how effective is the use of influencers as the main or only marketing tool to promote a product/service? If there were such cases, please describe them.

Last but not least were the advantages and disadvantages of working with influencers. As a result, this block provided a lot of insights on the role of influencers, although initially the research team just wanted to get more information to analyze interesting qualitative data. This section contained the questions below:

? Have you had any difficulties during the cooperation with influencers? If so, which ones?

? What advantages do you see in using influencers in promotion strategy? Describe them.

? What do you think, at the moment, influencers are a relevant channel of advancement and why?

As described earlier, the sample included representatives of marketing agencies, and entrepreneurs and photo and video production companies. The research involved production managers, CEOs, SMM directors, marketing and PR specialists from different companies and entrepreneurs. All respondents are included in marketing activities with influencers for promotion beauty and fashion brands and products. In this method, the research team was required to ask the respondents before the interview whether they were working with influencers and whether they had experience working with them. Many young professionals do not have experience of cooperation with influencers and were not able to become part of the sample. As a result, only one Respondent did not work with influencers, as he was responsible for other promotion channels and had little experience in the fashion industry.

Respondents were chosen by the method of target selection. It is used for qualitative research. The main task of this type of selection is to identify information-rich cases for in-depth multilateral study. Selection of critical effect on the objectives of the study. The target sample is used when a studied population is a specific group of people - "experts" in a particular field, they are also called the target group. If the subject of the research is focused on them, they serve as a kind of experts, since other people do not have the desired knowledge, behavior, and so on. The researcher is not interested in other properties of "experts". Participating respondents in the pretest interviews will be a part of the sample.

The next important detail is the interviewer him/herself. This person must be a qualified marketing specialist who has the skills to connect with people, a good memory, the ability to respond quickly to non-standard responses and patience. It is important that the interviewer should not exert psychological pressure on the respondents. Among the researchers, there is a specialist who has extensive experience in conducting in-depth interviews in the field of marketing and this research topic is interesting for her. The interviewer and all respondents should not be familiar with each other.

All in-depth interviews were conducted online via video calls, due to the global Coronavirus pandemic. This was necessary for further transcription and analysis of the received insights. The research team created the most comfortable conditions to get more insights from the respondents. Video calls were recorded after the permission of respondents was gotten. All respondents agreed to use their responses for further research on the role of influencers in promoting fashion and beauty brands.

All interviews were completely anonymous, so the research team does not have the right to name the companies, agencies, and productions whose employees took part in the research. Most of the respondents have signed NDA (non-disclosure agreement) applying for a job and working with clients.

The pretest of the protocol was an integral part of the study in order to understand errors in the preparation of questions in advance. To do this, it was necessary to conduct several trial interviews and identify questions that give researchers incomplete information or are ambiguous. These questions were replaced, and the protocol was used after the additional testing (Brown, Lindenberger & Bryant, 2008). For example, the research team replaced the question "How often do you use influencers as part of your marketing strategy?" with the question "In which cases does the use of influencers effectively affect the marketing strategy?" since it did not receive any useful information for the research and it did not provide insights.

After transcribing the interviews, the information was encoded. All insights were grouped, tabulated and analyzed by the research team. During encoding the results of in-depth interviews, it was necessary to check the coding with the help of independent experts, since researchers can encode information differently. Evaluating research objects, experts often disagree on the problem being solved. In this regard, there was a need to quantify the degree of agreement of experts. Kendall's coefficient of concordance (or Kendall's W) was equal to 98,11%, which was a very good indicator.

To study the results, the team used the frequency of the answer, frequency-construct ratio, construct weight, and construct-table ratio, but the data obtained is not statistical, because the sample is too small.

This encoding consists of sections, constructs, and sub-constructs:

? the section will be a theme;

? the construct will be a sub-theme;

? the sub-construct will be encoded insights.

There is an example of encoding insights below (Table 1):

Table 1. Clipping from the encoding of in-depth interview insights

There are 3 variables in this research: brands, influencers and followers. Brands is an independent variable, influencers and followers are dependent, because they rely on brands, they are both interested in.

· Brand - Unique design, sign, symbol, words, or a combination of these, employed in creating an image that identifies a product and differentiates it from its competitors. Over time, this image becomes associated with a level of credibility, quality, and satisfaction in the consumer's mind (see positioning). Thus, brands help harried consumers in a crowded and complex marketplace, by standing for certain benefits and value. The legal name for a brand is a trademark and, when it identifies or represents a firm, it is called a brand name (www.businessdictionary.com, 2016).

? Influencers - Individuals who have the power to affect purchase decisions of others because of their (real or perceived) authority, knowledge, position, or relationship. In consumer spending, members of a peer group or reference group act as influencers. In business to business (organizational) buying, internal employees (engineers, managers, purchasers) or external consultants act as influencers (www.businessdictionary.com, 2016).

? Followers - a person who follows or subscribes to another's posts on a social media website ("Definition of follower | Dictionary.com", 2020).

4. Description of the results

All the respondents for the survey are Instagram users from Russian Federation, which were found in this social network by the method of “snowball”, which was described earlier. The survey involved 390 respondents. Among the respondents 67% were women and 33% were men. Talking about age distribution, 68% of whom are aged 18 to 25 years, a significant part (18%) of respondents represent the age category 26-30 years.

Figure 1. Age distribution of the respondents

The question of which social networks respondents prefer to search and view entertaining content is aimed at checking insights received during the interview and identifying key social networks that users are currently using. It turned out that non-text social networks are leading in the survey by the number of preferences. The most frequently selected social networks for entertainment content among respondents were Instagram (292) and YouTube (280). The average number of responses was collected by VKontakte (187) and TikTok (113). Facebook turned out to be the most unpopular social network, gaining only 11 of preferences among respondents.