Edinburgh Napier University

  Shared demographic characteristics between influencers and followers such as gender can lead to favourable outcomes (Leung et al., 2022). Indeed, research suggests women perceive themselves to be more similar to a female influencer and is shown to positively affects women’s brand attitude and post engagement with an influencer (Hudders and De Jans, 2022). However, the connections formed with a virtual influencer is unexplored. VIs adopt range of gender, sexual, and racial identities. Yet, the individual responsible for the content may not conform to such an identity. For example, Shudu is a black female VI with over 230k followers whose content is created and promoted by a white man. This raises unanswered ethical and social questions. Therefore, to address this, the following research objectives are proposed:

• Assess the extent to which consumers respond to VIs’ promotion of prosocial causes
• Test whether different VI gender impact follower perceptions of their prosocial causes.