Crystal Smit

General Discussion 6 141 The question remains: which influence agents should be trained face-to-face in children’s widespread online social networks, which might differ from offline classroom networks? A relatively new marketing strategy, called influencer marketing (Brown & Hayes, 2008), offers new possibilities for the selection of influence agents in online social networks. In influencer marketing, social media celebrities are sponsored a s “influencers” to shape their followers’ opinions by subtly or overtly endorsing products on social media (Brown & Hayes, 2008). Social media influencers appear to impact consumer behavior and unhealthy food intake in children (de Veirman, Hudders, & Nelson, 2019). However, it is not yet clear whether these social media influencers can also be deployed to promote healthy food intake in children’s online social networks. There are promising results from a recent study showing that popular social media influencers promoting healthy foods can change a late adolescent’s healthy food attitude and purchase intention (Folkvord, Roes, & Bevelander, 2020). Thus, an important avenue for future research would be to investigate which type of influence agents are the most successful in children’s online social networks. One way to investigate this could be to measure the transmissibility of the behavior between different types of influence agents, such as celebrities and peer influencers (Ni, Chan, Leung, Lau, & Pang, 2014). TAKE AWAY MESSAGES In the following section, the most important conclusions of this dissertation are formulated in five main take away messages for research as well as intervention practice. 1. The Share H 2 O social network intervention is a promising approach to improve healthy drinking behaviors in children by stimulating positive peer influence and enhancing intrinsic motivation. 2. Social network intervention developers should focus on creating an autonomy- supportive context in the training to motivate the influence agents to adopt the behavior and support them in motivating their peers as well.