Influencer-Brand Congruence EFA and CFA data set

The data set contains data from three rounds of testing.

In the first data collection stage, we used Patrick Gunkel's list of 638 personality traits including 234 positive traits (37%), 112 neutral traits (18%) and 292 negative traits (46%). Subsequently, the items were rated by 82 undergraduate students . The pretesting consisted in three rounds, one for positive, negative and neutral traits (evaluated by the same group of students), during which the students were asked to rate the traits ability to describe both brand and an influencer. Items were rated on a 7 point scale. We set 5 as a cut-off and online items rated 5 - descriptive, 6 - very descriptive and 7 - extremely descriptive were chosen for next evaluation. This first pretest round led to a reduction from 638 personality traits to 148 negative, 70 neutral and 135 positive traits.

The reduced number of traits was rated by a focus group assembled from 43 employees from three marketing companies. Similarly to the first rating round, we opted for 5 as the cut-off point leading to another reduction on 229 traits. During the focus group, some of the participants suggested that many of the traits are rather synonymous and thus redundant. Therefore, synonyms were eliminated by cross comparison with Thesaurus.com (Dictionary.com, 2022). After this last manipulation, we reached a final count of 102 personality traits.

After the pretest stage, once the list of characteristics was completed, 6 brands (ThredUp, Audible, Skillshare, Function of Beauty, ColourPop, Hello fresh) and 9 influencers for each were selected. Overall, ThredUp and related influencers were evaluated by 151 individuals, Audible by 162, Skillshare by 145, Function of Beauty by 168, ColourPop by 158 and Hello fresh by 173. The confirmatory group consisted of 345 respondents.