How readers' perceived self-congruity and functional congruity affect bloggers' informational influence Perceived interactivity as a moderator

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to treat bloggers as human brands and applies self-congruity theory to explore how actual and ideal blogger-reader self-congruity, combined with the blog’s functional congruity, influences blogger-reader relationship quality (BRRQ) and the blogger’s informational influence, taking perceived interactivity among blog members as a moderator. Design/methodology/approach – Using a survey of 372 female beauty blog readers, this study employs the structural equation modelling approach to investigate the proposed model. Findings – The empirical findings indicate that readers’ perceived self-congruity with beauty bloggers raises the bloggers’ informational influence, mediated by BRRQ and functional congruity. Actual self-congruity has greater predictive power than ideal self-congruity in explaining bloggers’ informational influence. Moreover, perceived interactivity plays a two-sided role because it strengthens the positive impact of BRRQ on informational influence but weaken...