Supervisors: Susanne Pedersen & Christiane Høvring
Discussants: Sascha Steinmann & Pernille Smith

Abstract
This PhD project investigates the professionalization of social media influencers, focusing on how their occupational role is defined by balancing genuine relationships with followers alongside brand obligations. While existing literature has predominantly examined influencer marketing through brand-marketing and follower-behavior perspectives, the industry’s shift from emergent to established calls for a more nuanced understanding of the influencer as a professional role. Addressing this call, the project illuminates the influencer profession through an occupational lens.

Using an approach involving interviews, netnographic observation, and diary data, the project explores the strategies influencers employ to manage authenticity and commercial demands in their work.

This first-year presentation will center around my initial paper, a conceptual piece guided by the question: How can the occupational role of influencers be conceptualized in light of the competing demands they face as professionals? The paper aims to define key dimensions and paradoxes within the influencer profession, laying a theoretical foundation to understand influencers as complex professionals within the digital economy, rather than merely as marketing channels.

Everyone is welcome!