ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Commun.
Sec. Advertising and Marketing Communication
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2025.1509682
This article is part of the Research TopicArtificial Intelligence in the Context of Marketing CommunicationsView all 3 articles
Reputation Through Artificial Intelligence? On the Effectiveness of Virtual Influencers as Spokespersons in Corporate Crisis Communication
Provisionally accepted
Zoe Olbermann*
Magdalena Nagl- Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany
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With virtual social media influencers, a new form of brand ambassador has established itself on social networks. In our study, we look at the extent to which they are also suitable as spokespersons after a corporate crisis. To this end, we conducted a 3x1 between-subject online experiment (N=169) and compared human influencers with two types of virtual influencers: humanized virtual influencers and animated virtual influencers. Our results show that the two types of virtual influencers differ only in their visual -but not in their mental -human-likeness. The perceived human-likeness triggers a chain of psychological processes -which ultimately has a positive effect on the acceptance of crisis communication and thus on the brand image. In our study, we refer to the limitations of our study and thus classify the knowledge gained. The results underline the complexity but also the necessity of investigating artificial intelligence in brand and corporate communication.
Keywords: Virtual influencer, Social Media, crisis communication, brand ambassador, Perceived similarity, Public Relations, artificial intelligence
Received: 11 Oct 2024; Accepted: 16 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Olbermann and Nagl. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Zoe Olbermann, Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany
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