CFP RSA2024: SS22. Opening the geographical black box of the influencer economy

[Han Chu]

*Message sent from a system outside of UConn.*


RSA Annual Conference 2024

June 11-14, 2024, Florence, Italy


Opening the geographical black box of the influencer economy (SS22)

Session Type: Paper Session (in-person)

Session Organizers:

Han Chu, Kiel University, Germany 
c...@geographie.uni-kiel.de

Robert Hassink, Kiel University, Germany 
hass...@geographie.uni-kiel.de

Chun Yang, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, China 
chuny...@hkbu.edu.hk

Deadline for abstract submission: January 30, 2024

Session Description:

The ‘influencer economy’ is a recent innovation emerging from digital platforms 
and their abiliity to bridge virtual and physical space to both create new 
industries (e.g., digital content industry, mobile games, live streaming 
industry, online retail, online hailing etc.), as well as newly emerging 
platform ecologies (Ibert et al., 2022). Although there is now an increasing 
economic geography literature on several ‘economies’ that emerged because of 
digitalization and digital platforms, such as the platform economy (Kenney and 
Zysman, 2020) and the gig economy (Anwar and Graham, 2020), so far, little 
research has been done on the influencer economy, although it represents an 
increasingly important part of the platform economy (Economist, 2022; Hung et 
al., 2022; Engels, 2022, 2023; Shapiro). In China, its contribution to the 
economy is estimated at $210bn, that is 1.4% of GDP, whereas 75% of marketers 
in the US spend money on them (Economist 2022). According to Shapiro and Aneja 
(2019, 19) “14.8 million Americans earned income by posting their creations on 
Instagram, WordPress, YouTube, Tumblr and five other platforms”. The big 
thriving of the influencer economy have become a global phenomenon (Backaler, 
2018).

The emergence of the influencer economy is highly conditioned by the platform 
economy (Kenney and Zysman, 2020), and is part of the broader concepts of the 
creator economy (Florida, 2022; Rieder et al., 2023) and attention economy 
(Davenport and Beck, 2001; Kubler, 2023). Social media influencers are 
individuals who earn money directly from personal brand building and monetize 
their influence due to sponsored content (Khamis et al., 2017). Influencers can 
become celebrities, and some celebrities, who gain their fame through 
traditional media, such as film, can become influencers, so there is some 
overlap between the two terms. Typical industries using influencers include 
fashion, cosmetics, beauty, plastic surgery, gaming, travel, and luxury 
branding. Influencers can be regarded as ‘circulators’ (Pike, 2013) of brands 
and value creation, between producers, consumers and regulators. They affect 
reputation, symbolic value and can also hide undesired associations (Ibert et 
al., 2019) or political messages (Schneider, 2021). Culture and norms and 
values affect influencers’ style, and vice versa, for instance in the case of 
China with its Wanghong culture and wanghonglian aesthetic (Wang and Picone, 
2023; Abidin, 2016). Influencers are impacting traditional business models, 
including not only offline sales channels but also traditional e-commerce 
channels. The influencers in “half-e-commerce platforms” represent an 
enhancement based on the network effects of the platform economy and 
monopolistic effects (Chu et al., 2023). In China, the sales capability of a 
single live broadcast by top influencers can even surpass the annual sales of 
an entire normal shopping mall (Baijiahao, 2023). However, research on this 
influential power is limited, let alone on restrictions and controls. After the 
emergence of the platform economy, the influencer economy has once again 
changed the way products are produced and supplied in traditional 
manufacturing, retailing and service industries and further changed the 
distribution and method of profit capture. Moreover, influencers increasingly 
affect place marketing and place branding (Banks, 2022).

Recently, some articles in economic geography touched upon the influencer 
economy, such as in work by Repenning and Oechslen (2023) on “digipreneurs”, 
which is broader than influencers, including producers and entrepreneurs, and 
Poorthuis et al. (2020) and their work on the fashion industry from an 
attention economy and social media perspective.

Our session aims at opening the geographical black box of the influencer 
economy further with papers that not only map the influencer economy in a 
descriptive way, but also focus on research questions that are affected by 
several perspectives and paradigms in economic geography, such as evolutionary, 
relational, institutional economic geography. We welcome papers both empirical, 
theoretical, as well as policy-related papers, as well as comparative papers, 
on the influencer economy, from a broad range of industries and locations.

Topics and questions mig

Unsubscribe

[Eirik Vatne]

*Message sent from a system outside of UConn.*


Unsubscribe this e-mail adress from your listserver.