Is Influencer Marketing More than Persuasion? A SOR-Based Review of the Indian Consumer Mindset

Influencer marketing has emerged as a dominant communication strategy in India’s rapidly expanding digital marketplace, reshaping how brands engage with consumers across social media platforms. Despite growing scholarly attention, existing research remains fragmented across themes such as celebrity endorsements, influencer credibility, consumer engagement, and technology-driven communication practices. This study synthesizes the evolving body of literature on influencer marketing in India using bibliometric mapping, thematic analysis, and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling. The analysis reveals that the field’s intellectual structure is defined by four major research themes and latent topic patterns: celebrity endorsements, influencer credibility, consumer engagement, and technology-driven communication practices. A central outcome of the study is the development of a conceptual framework grounded in Stimulus–Organism–Response (S–O–R) theory that explicitly demonstrates how influencer attributes and digital communication stimuli trigger consumer cognition and behavioral outcomes. The study’s primary theoretical contribution is to integrate the previously disconnected research streams into a cohesive framework, providing a foundation for future theoretical development and scholarly inquiry. This systematic synthesis offers a structured understanding of the specific mechanisms driving influencer marketing in the Indian context.