Companies are spending more money on influencer marketing than ever before. The industry ballooned from $1.7 billion in 2017 to an estimated $24 billion by 2024. Most executives say they plan to keep increasing those budgets. Yet a persistent problem haunts the boardroom: how do you actually measure whether that spending is working?
A large team of marketing researchers set out to build a new conceptual framework that could help answer that question, not just for brands paying influencers, but for influencers themselves and the social media platforms that host their content. The resulting paper, published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, proposes a way to think about influencer marketing as three interconnected “value chains,” each driven by a different player chasing long-term financial returns.
Why existing research fell short
Barak Libai of Reichman University in Israel led the 15-author effort, which included scholars from institutions across the United States, Europe, and Asia. The team observed that although academic interest in influencer marketing had exploded, with Google Scholar entries climbing from about 1,100 in 2017 to roughly 11,000 by 2023, the research remained fragmented. Studies tended to focus on narrow questions, like what makes an influencer persuasive or how disclosure of a paid partnership affects engagement.
What was missing, according to the authors, was a wider lens. Marketers were struggling to connect influencer activity to actual financial outcomes, often relying on “intermediate” metrics such as likes, shares, and impressions. Meanwhile, influencers were juggling short-term brand deals against the risk of alienating their audiences. And the platforms sitting in between were quietly adjusting their algorithms in ways that shifted power across the entire system.
The team proposed a single organizing principle to tie it all together: equity. In marketing, “equity” generally refers to the total long-term value that a group of people represents. Applied here, the idea yields three distinct but connected concepts. Firms pursue “customer equity,” or the combined lifetime value of all their current and future customers. Influencers pursue “follower equity,” the total long-term value of their audience. And platforms pursue “user equity,” the aggregate value of the people who use their apps and websites.
What brands need to know: The customer value chain
The paper’s first value chain describes how an influencer can contribute to a firm’s bottom line. It traces a path from the firm’s strategic choices (who to target, how to position the brand) through its marketing decisions (product, price, promotion, and distribution) to the customer actions that ultimately generate revenue. Those actions include acquiring new customers, developing existing ones so they buy more, retaining them over time, and enabling them to influence others.
A key idea here is that most companies still evaluate influencer campaigns using engagement numbers rather than sales data. One recent study cited in the paper tracked the full path from followers to revenue and found that engagement could actually explain why influencers with fewer followers sometimes delivered a better return on investment than those with massive audiences. The reasoning is that smaller influencers tend to produce higher engagement rates, which can translate more efficiently into purchases.
The authors suggest two new financial metrics for evaluating influencer partnerships. The first is “influencer campaign value,” which captures how much a single campaign changes the firm’s overall customer equity. The second is “influencer lifetime value,” which sums up the expected contribution of an ongoing relationship with an influencer across multiple collaborations over time. This distinction mirrors how companies have shifted over the years from evaluating individual customer transactions to managing the lifetime value of customer relationships.
The paper also highlights a tension around pricing. Influencers frequently offer discount codes to their followers as a way to build trust and demonstrate value. But heavy discounting can erode a brand’s profit margins and even dilute its image. Companies need to weigh the customer acquisition benefits of those discounts against the potential long-term costs.
How influencers manage their own brand
The second value chain flips the perspective. Instead of asking how influencers help firms, it asks how influencers build and protect their own financial futures. The paper treats influencers as “human brands” who must attract, grow, and retain an engaged community of followers over time.
In this framework, an influencer’s “product” is their content. The language they use, the stories they tell, and how interactive they are all shape whether followers stick around. Research cited in the paper found, for example, that high-energy, exclamatory language (“It’s totally AMAZING!”) was linked to higher engagement for micro-influencers because it made them seem more trustworthy. For macro-influencers, however, the same kind of language was linked to lower engagement.
The authenticity problem sits at the center of this value chain. Every time an influencer accepts a paid partnership, there is a risk that followers will see them as less genuine. The paper describes this as a core trade-off: sponsored content brings in revenue in the short term, but it can erode the perceived authenticity that keeps followers engaged over the long term. Some influencers try to sidestep this tension by launching their own product lines or placing content behind subscription paywalls, creating income streams that do not depend on brand deals.
Influencers also face lifecycle dynamics similar to those of consumer products. Research on financial influencers in social trading found that follower acquisition follows a bell-shaped curve, with periods of rapid growth, stabilization, and eventual decline. This finding suggests that companies might get a better deal by partnering with influencers early in their growth trajectory, when fees are lower and the audience is still expanding.
Platforms hold the hidden levers
The third piece of the framework focuses on the role of social media platforms, which the authors argue has been the most under-researched part of the ecosystem. Platforms are not neutral distribution channels. Through their content recommendation systems, often called “curation algorithms,” they decide what each user actually sees in their feed. That gives platforms enormous power over both influencers and brands.
The paper draws an analogy to the relationship between consumer goods manufacturers and retail stores. Just as a grocery store can boost or bury a product by choosing its shelf placement, a platform can promote or limit an influencer’s content. If a platform decides to push a particular creator’s videos to new audiences, that creator benefits. But if the platform dials back visibility, the creator’s engagement and earning potential can drop, sometimes without any clear explanation.
This dynamic creates what the authors call “channel conflict.” Platforms and influencers both compete for the same pool of advertising dollars. A platform structured around “interest graphs,” which connect users based on shared topics rather than personal relationships, can reduce an influencer’s bargaining power. On such a platform, the content matters more than who posted it, and advertisers may find it harder to identify which influencers to partner with. TikTok, the paper notes, is a prime example of this model. It compensates by sharing a portion of its advertising revenue with content creators.
The China factor
The paper calls attention to significant differences between Western and Chinese influencer marketing. In China, traditional Western digital channels like search engines and email marketing play a smaller role. Instead, platforms like Douyin (the Chinese counterpart to TikTok) and LittleRedBook dominate, and livestream commerce is a major sales channel. In this environment, firms maintain continuous, “always-on” collaborations with rotating groups of influencers, and multi-channel networks (MCNs) act as agencies and training grounds for creators.
The authors note that because a significant share of current research uses data from China, findings may not automatically apply to Western markets. The cultural context, the platform structures, and the business models for influencers differ enough that results from one setting should be applied to the other with caution.
Practical takeaways and open questions
For business leaders, the framework offers several actionable starting points. First, companies should try to evaluate influencer partnerships using long-term customer value rather than short-term engagement metrics alone. Tracking discount codes and affiliate links is a start, but the real question is whether the customers acquired through influencers continue to buy and remain loyal over time.
Second, companies should be aware of the tension influencers face between monetization and authenticity. If a brand imposes too many restrictions on how an influencer creates content, the influencer may produce material that feels forced, potentially reducing its effectiveness. Research cited in the paper found that influencers who felt a stronger connection to their followers were more sensitive to such contractual constraints.
Third, platform dynamics matter. The way a platform’s algorithm works can amplify or dampen the results of an influencer campaign in ways that brands cannot fully predict or control. Companies that diversify their influencer efforts across multiple platforms may be better positioned to manage this uncertainty.
The paper acknowledges that many of its proposals remain theoretical. Measuring customer equity from influencer marketing in practice is still extremely difficult, and the data needed to calculate metrics like influencer lifetime value is often unavailable. The authors outline 11 research directions, which they organize under the acronym “INFLUENCERS,” spanning topics from the role of artificial intelligence influencers to cross-platform dynamics to follow-up studies on how authenticity affects long-term financial outcomes.
What the framework does offer is a shared vocabulary and a structural map. Rather than studying influencers, brands, and platforms in isolation, it places all three in the same picture, each pursuing its own version of long-term value, and sometimes bumping into each other along the way.
