Goethe University Frankfurt
Frankfurt School of Finance & Management
KU Leuven
The annual AMA/Marketing Science Institute/H. Paul Root award is given to the Journal of Marketing article that has made the most significant contribution to the advancement of the practice of marketing in a calendar year. It is cosponsored by the American Marketing Association and the Marketing Science Institute, and it honors past AMA Board Chair H. Paul Root, who also served as president of MSI from 1990 to 1998. The winners of the 2023 AMA/MSI/H. Paul Root Award are Simone Wies, Alexander Bleier, and Alexander Edeling for their article “Finding Goldilocks Influencers: How Follower Count Drives Social Media Engagement” (Volume 87, Issue 3).
The selection committee, composed of Detelina Marinova (University of Missouri), Jacob Goldenberg (Reichman University), and Jie Zhang (University of Maryland) noted:
This paper leveraged industry collaboration and proprietary data from several influencer agencies, complemented with eye tracking, lab studies and simulations, to offer novel insights that can guide practice on influencer marketing. The authors show that while a rise in influencer follower count drives consumer engagement, this engagement subsequently decreases unless it is mitigated by higher content customization and lower familiarity of the sponsored brand.
This work has significant real-world impact as corporate spending on influencers will double in the next three years, and Statista estimates the size of the global influencer market as 24 billion in 2024, a 40.3% CAGR since 2016. The paper is in the top 5% of the 24,187,594 research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
A quick, informative summary of this research is available here.
The article will be honored at the 2024 AMA Summer Academic Conference, August 16-18 in Boston, Massachusetts. Previous recipients of this award can be found here.
The other excellent finalists for this award are:
- “Bad News? Send an AI. Good News? Send a Human,” by Aaron M. Garvey, TaeWoo Kim, Adam Duhachek
- “Complaint De-Escalation Strategies on Social Media,” by Dennis Herhausen, Lauren Grewal, Krista Hill Cummings, Anne L. Roggeveen, Francisco Villarroel Ordenes, and Dhruv Grewal
- “A War on Sugar? Effects of Reduced Sugar Content and Package Size in the Soda Category,” by Kristopher O. Keller, and Jonne Y. Guyt
- “Innovation Imprinting: Why Some Firms Beat the Post-IPO Innovation Slump,” by Simone Wies, Christine Moorman, and Rajesh K. Chandy
Go to the Journal of Marketing