When and why do consumers resist virtual influencer endorsement? The role of product depth and advertising claim types

Unlike human influencers, virtual influencers lack the sensory capacity to directly experience the endorsed products, and this can render their experientially based claims less authentic and credible. At the same time, products differ in inspection depth in that deep (shallow) products require significant (minimal) amount of physical interaction to evaluate. We propose that the relative persuasive effectiveness of virtual (vs. human) influencers is dependent on the inspection depth of the endorsed products. Through a quasi-experiment using real social media data and two lab experiments, we show that endorse type (virtual vs. human) and product inspection depth (deep vs. shallow) interact to influence persuasive effectiveness. Virtual (vs. human) influencers are less persuasive when endorsing deep products, but are equally persuasive when endorsing shallow products. Perceived inauthenticity and credibility serially mediate the joint effect of endorser type and product inspection depth. Furthermore, when the Ad message utilizes factual (vs. evaluative) information, the disadvantage of virtual (vs. human) influencers for deep products is attenuated.