A More Effective Kind of Influencer? The Podcaster-Listener Relationship and the Perceived Proximity of Hosts

With traditional digital advertising methods becoming less effective, many brands now include influencer marketing in their digital strategies. However, cooperating with social media influencers (SMIs) is not without challenges and this research proposes podcast hosts as an effective alternative. It explores the host-listener relationship as well as hosts’ perceived proximity to their audience and compares this to the connections SMIs have with their followers. It aims to understand the key differences between these relationships and assess whether hosts can establish deeper connections with their audience and therefore be more effective than SMIs in helping businesses communicate with their audience. The findings suggest that podcast hosts are perceived as more proximal by their audience than SMIs and may therefore be able to better influence their decisions and may therefore be more effective partners for businesses. The analysis highlights consumer empowerment as a key concept of the host-listener connection and provides the building blocks for a proposed new influencer-audience relationship model: the empowered parasocial relationship. This paper is based on a master´s thesis for the study program Digital Marketing at the university of Applied Studies Kufstein Tyrol.