Introduction: In the last years of the 20th century, the Internet emerged and made its place among human communities, and people around the world began to use it to speed up their lives. The applications of the Internet include creating connections, carrying out daily tasks, developing businesses, following up on administrative matters, etc. The development of cyberspace also led to the creation of social networks, which have become popular among humans and billions of people use these applications daily. Initially, the purpose of launching these platforms was to create human connections, and people used it for entertainment and interaction with other users. Over time, some people identified opportunities to create added value in these networks and used these infrastructures to carry out economic activities and create and grow businesses. After developing social networks, some people gained many fans by producing content. This attracted the attention of businesses to use these people to advance marketing goals. Influencer marketing is a method by which influential people promote products and services. Influencers are always considered by brand marketers as a reliable source of reliable information, and influencers on social networks such as Instagram have become one of the main elements of virtual marketing campaigns. Social networks make it possible to record the opinions of followers on advertising posts, and this allows followers of these people, as buyers of advertised products, to record positive and negative reactions in the shortest possible time and without intermediaries or costs. This allows influential followers to easily provide their opinions about the product and its functions to influential people and product manufacturers. Ultimately, people consider themselves partners in the creation and development of co-creation of value about the product, and by participating in providing opinions about the product, they will co-create customer value. This phenomenon is more evident in the cosmetics, health and beauty market. Given that the phenomenon of social networks and influential people, with the development of cyberspace, has been integrated into the lives of human societies and is increasing day by day, this research attempts to examine the lesser-known parts of influential people in social networks and their relationship with the development of value co-creation behavior and to identify the components related to it.
Research Methodology: This research is fundamental and applied in terms of its purpose and qualitative in terms of the nature of the data. The required data was obtained through open and in-depth interviews. The research is exploratory based on data analysis. Grounded data theory was used to analyze the data. After conducting in-depth interviews, the interview texts were analyzed and categorized in three stages.
The statistical population consisted of marketing and business experts and experts, as well as activists in the field of virtual businesses and influential marketing. To determine the members of the community of informants, three indicators of at least two years of continuous and specialized activity, having a university education, and familiarity with the field of virtual communications were considered and a list of these people was prepared. Then, using the purposeful and non-probability snowball sampling method, the final list of interviewees was obtained.
Initially, ten informants were selected for interviews, and due to the lack of theoretical enrichment, three experts were added to the statistical sample in the second stage. After conducting interviews with thirteen experts, the researcher achieved information enrichment.
To measure data, interview protocols were developed and after conducting interviews, the interview texts were analyzed using coding in three stages. In the first stage, the texts were categorized into open codes based on frequency, intensity, and emphasis. In the second stage, homogeneous open codes were converted into axial codes in various categories, and finally axial codes were obtained.
To examine the validity of the interview protocols, face validity was used and the protocol and interview questions were provided to 10 experts and approved. The reliability of the interview process was also confirmed by recoding and agreement between the two coders.
Results: After analyzing the field data and at the end of the coding process, 121 initial codes were categorized into 18 core codes and 8 main categories including characteristics of the influential person, tasks of the influential person, prerequisites for value co-creation, main components of co-creation, implementation of value co-creation in influencer marketing, methods and tools for value co-creation in influencer marketing, benefits of value co-creation in influencer marketing, and outcomes of value co-creation in influencer marketing.
Discussion and Conclusion: Finally, the components related to the development of customer value co-creation behavior in influencer marketing were identified and suggestions were presented regarding the development of customer value co-creation behavior in influencer marketing.