Mid Sweden University

Problem: Blogs have become very popular in past few years. They can have hundreds of thousands of followers in a week. Word of mouth happens on blogs constantly and it can also be fertilized, in which a third party have paid for it. Bloggers’ actions and opinions have an impact on their readers’ consumer behaviour. However, it is unclear how bloggers impact on their readers and how the readers see the bloggers.Purpose: The purpose of this master thesis is to describe and analyse, if bloggers are more often seen as fellow consumers than as role models and what makes word of mouth marketing effective by bloggers.Design/methodology/approach: T o give an answer for the research problem, aqualitative method is chosen for the study. The data are collected throughsemistructured interviews with nine 1828 year old female consumers.Findings: F ive of the respondents see bloggers more like fellow consumers, two more like role models and two could not decide. That how actively the respondent followed the blogger, did not have any impact that. The role of bloggers might have changed during the years.