Abstract
This article investigates how digital influencers in Portugal communicate sustainability on Instagram and how such messaging is interpreted by Generation Z audiences. While influencer culture plays a growing role in shaping sustainable consumption, little is known about the symbolic, aesthetic and emotional strategies through which sustainability is mediated – and even less about how these strategies are decoded by Gen Z publics. Addressing this gap, the study adopts a two-stage qualitative research design. Study 1 applies a Visual-Verbal Video Analysis (VVVA) to 200 Instagram Reels across four influencer tiers (mega, macro, micro and nano), examining how emotional coherence, aesthetic labor and symbolic distinction shape sustainability communication. Study 2 conducts focus group discussions with 29 Portuguese Gen Z users – using prompts on sustainable consumption, authenticity and emotional engagement – to explore how participants interpret emotional cues, assess authenticity and negotiate trust. Findings reveal a stratified symbolic economy of sustainable influence. Mega- and macro-influencers prioritize branded aesthetics and aspirational tone, often displacing sustainability into lifestyle tropes. In contrast, micro- and nano-influencers embed ecological values through visual minimalism, emotional intimacy and politicized storytelling. Gen Z participants exhibit ambivalent trust toward influencer messaging, relying on affective resonance and stylistic coherence rather than explicit claims. Performances of sincerity, marked by aesthetic simplicity, emotional modulation and symbolic restraint, emerge as key indicators of perceived credibility. The study concludes that sustainability on Instagram operates less as an informational discourse and more as an affective performance. Influencers function as cultural intermediaries who aestheticize ethical living through emotionally legible scripts, shaping how sustainability is visualized, interpreted and practiced within contemporary digital consumer culture.
Introduction
In recent years, digital influencers have emerged as central agents in shaping consumer culture, operating at the intersection of emotional persuasion, symbolic curation and platform visibility. This transformation has been particularly salient in sustainability communication, where influencers serve as cultural intermediaries who aestheticize ethical values and embed them into visually coherent, emotionally resonant narratives (Barbeta-Viñas, 2023; Colucci & Pedroni, 2022; Stewart et al., 2023). Unlike traditional advertising or corporate messaging, influencer content blends personal storytelling, lifestyle branding and algorithmic optimization, creating what Kapoor (2024) describes as a form of symbolic labor that renders moral commitments marketable.
Within this economy of visibility, authenticity is less a stable attribute than a strategic performance calibrated for emotional coherence and relational proximity (Frig & Jaakkola, 2023; Pedroni, 2022). Trust is no longer anchored solely in factual claims or institutional legitimacy, but emerges as a perceptual effect constructed through aesthetic discipline, emotional rhythm and consistent mood (McCosker, 2015; Scott et al., 2024). These dynamics are amplified on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, where algorithmic infrastructures reward affectively charged content that adheres to visual and symbolic conventions (Airoldi & Rokka, 2022). As Gerhards (2025) argues, the influencer profession is increasingly subject to moral scrutiny, with accusations of inauthenticity and commodified ethics prompting strategic responses such as role distancing, silence and moral reframing (Wellman et al., 2020).
This symbolic economy is particularly resonant among Generation Z, who navigate social media environments through what Nixon (2020) calls “mooded morality” – a form of ethical interpretation based on emotional tonality, stylistic coherence and semiotic cues rather than ideological clarity. In this article we follow widely used demographic conventions and define Generation Z as those born 1997–2012; at the time of writing (October 2025), this cohort is approximately 12–28 years old (by year-end 2025, 13–28) (Dimock, 2019). For this demographic, influencers not only represent aspirational lifestyles but also serve as affective guides in making sense of sustainability, often through stylized scripts that blend critique and comfort (Febrian, 2024; Sun & Ding, 2024). This raises important questions about how sustainability is being communicated, performed and interpreted in digital spaces.
Despite the growing cultural relevance of these dynamics, little is known about how sustainability communication unfolds in the Portuguese influencer ecosystem, or how these messages are received and interpreted by Portuguese Gen Z audiences. This study addresses this gap by analyzing how digital influencers in Portugal communicate sustainability on Instagram and how such content is perceived by Gen Z consumers. This research adopts a mixed-methods design comprising two complementary stages. First, a visual-verbal video analysis (VVVA) was conducted on 200 Instagram Reels produced by Portuguese influencers across four tiers – mega, macro, micro and nano – to examine how sustainability is visually and emotionally performed through multimodal cues. Second, focus group discussions with Portuguese members of Generation Z explored how audiences interpret, evaluate and emotionally respond to these sustainability narratives. The purpose was not only to map content strategies but also to understand how symbolic labor, aesthetic coherence and emotional resonance contribute to the cultural legitimacy of sustainable influence. In line with standard benchmarks in digital marketing research, influencer tiers were classified by follower count: mega-influencers (over 1 million followers), macro-influencers (100,000–1 million), micro-influencers (10,000–100,000) and nano-influencers (below 10,000) (De Veirman et al., 2017; Kay et al., 2020).
For analytical clarity, this study defines digital influencers as social media creators who build visibility and credibility through personal branding and audience engagement (Abidin, 2018; Khamis et al., 2017). Sustainability is understood as a cultural and affective discourse, rather than a strictly environmental one, through which ethical and ecological values are aestheticized, performed and negotiated within digital consumer culture (Barbeta-Viñas, 2023; Colucci & Pedroni, 2022).
Literature Review
Influencer Culture and the Symbolic Mediation of Sustainability
Performing Trust and Authenticity as Cultural Capital
Trust and authenticity are foundational to influencer culture, particularly in the context of sustainability communication. While traditionally understood through a behavioral lens as antecedents to persuasive effectiveness and consumer loyalty (Lou & Yuan, 2019), recent scholarship reframes these concepts as situated performances embedded within digital economies of visibility, algorithmic logics and symbolic value. Influencers function not merely as promotional agents but as cultural brokers, mediating affective meaning, modeling aspirational lifestyles, and curating ethical narratives through visual and emotional labor (Colucci & Pedroni, 2022; Scott et al., 2024).
Within this symbolic economy, authenticity is increasingly constructed through what Stewart et al. (2023) describe as a “performative parasocial strategy” (p. 3), wherein influencers generate trust by simulating emotional coherence and relational proximity. This authenticity does not reside in the factual accuracy of claims, but rather emerges affectively, through consistency in tone, stylistic cohesion and alignment with cultural expectations. These dynamics are particularly pronounced among nano- and micro-influencers, whose low-budget production values, spontaneous narratives and emotionally intimate aesthetics heighten perceptions of ordinariness and accessibility (Frig & Jaakkola, 2023; Pedroni, 2021).
This symbolic capital is not only aesthetic, but moral. Emotional tropes such as slowness, simplicity and care (Barbeta-Viñas, 2023), visual coherence as metaphorical polish (Kapoor, 2024), and narrative self-discipline together constitute authenticity as an ethical performance. Trust becomes not an innate quality, but a perceptual outcome, produced and sustained through deliberate affective and symbolic labor (Bourdieu, 1984).
Yet this moral legitimacy remains unstable. Gerhards (2025) conceptualizes influencers as “dirty workers,” stigmatized for their monetization of personal authenticity and blurred ethical boundaries. In navigating moral taint, influencers engage in strategic role management, redefining questionable practices – such as sponsorship opacity or non-disclosure – as acts of discretion or integrity (Wellman et al., 2020). Musiyiwa and Jacobson (2023) further show how platform-specific pressures, including algorithmic deprioritization and fears of audience disengagement, often lead influencers to withhold commercial transparency. The affective bond between influencer and audience may be compromised by explicit sponsorship tags like #ad, illustrating a central paradox: regulatory disclosure, while ethically mandated, can erode the emotional architecture of trust.
This paradox is symptomatic of broader structural tensions. Trust, in digital influencer economies, is not a stable measure of audience confidence, but a dynamic equilibrium of aesthetic strategy, emotional modulation and algorithmic negotiation. McCosker’s (2015) concept of vitality affects helps illuminate how influencers sustain engagement: through subtle variations in gesture, voice, pacing and mood that generate affective resonance. These fluctuations are essential to what Papacharissi (2014) terms affective publics – ephemeral collectives organized not around deliberative discourse, but around shared intensities. In this framework, authenticity is not verified but felt; trust is curated rather than discovered.
In sum, trust and authenticity in influencer-mediated sustainability are neither static nor transparent. They are symbolic and affective effects, shaped by cultural expectations, negotiated under platform logics, and strategically performed to render sustainability both legible and emotionally compelling.
While authenticity in influencer communication is often strategically curated, this does not preclude genuine affective expression. As Abidin (2016) and Duffy and Hund (2015) states, authenticity online operates as a relational construct, an evolving negotiation between intention, performance and audience interpretation. In this study, we therefore treat authenticity not as simulation or deception, but as a situated affective effect that emerges through stylistic coherence and perceived sincerity within platform-specific dynamics.
Emotional Aesthetics and the Affective Grammar of Influence
Emotion functions as a semiotic resource within influencer-mediated sustainability communication. Barbeta-Viñas (2023) describes this process as emotional governance: the strategic modulation of affective signals that shape how sustainability is experienced, rather than merely understood. Visual tropes, such as soft lighting, slow transitions and verbal codes like “simplicity” or “slowness,” create affective atmospheres that render sustainability emotionally meaningful (Frig & Jaakkola, 2023). These atmospheres resonate strongly with younger audiences, particularly Gen Z, for whom emotional coherence is often more persuasive than ideological argument. In this sense, the emotional framing of sustainability aligns with a broader post-truth media environment, where affective resonance frequently substitutes for evidential reasoning and trust in scientific expertise is increasingly mediated by aesthetic and moral cues (Corner, 2017).
This aligns with Ahmed’s (2010) theory of affective economies, which conceptualizes emotions as socially circulating forces that “stick” to objects, ideas and identities. Through their aesthetic labor, influencers attach moral resonance to sustainable goods and practices, enabling followers to read ethics through mood and style. Pedroni (2022) terms this trustworthy distance: a performance of semi-intimacy that balances identification with aspirational detachment. The emotional efficacy of this mode is shaped by platform logics: Instagram, TikTok and similar environments reward content that is emotionally consistent, visually legible and algorithmically optimized (Airoldi & Rokka, 2022). Such content is promoted within algorithmic recommendation systems, being shown to wider audiences through mechanisms like TikTok’s “For You” page or Instagram’s “Explore” feed, which amplify posts that generate sustained engagement (Bucher, 2018).
Recent studies further illustrate how affect operates as both a relational and economic asset in influencer culture. Sun and Ding (2024) demonstrate that influencers mobilize emotions such as anger, empathy and vulnerability not only to engage publics, but also to generate commercial value through brand alignment. These affective registers are both sincere and strategic, fostering what Coffey and Kanai (2021) call affective alignments: shared emotional orientations that foster identification and belonging. Borchers (2023) notes that while marketers rhetorically valorize emotional authenticity, they impose soft constraints that encourage influencers to remain emotionally evocative, but within predictable, monetizable bounds. This creates a paradox in which influencers are expected to feel genuinely while performing selectively.
Febrian (2024) extends this analysis to religious influencers, introducing the concept of visual authority: a moral legitimacy constructed not through rational argument or institutional power, but through coherent affective and visual cues, such as warm tones, soft gestures and symbolic closeness. These strategies are equally applicable to sustainability influencers, who use spatial arrangements and aesthetic atmospheres to signal ethical orientation. Emotional tone, in this context, becomes a proxy for moral credibility.
While these performances foster connection and symbolic coherence, they are not ideologically neutral. As Ahmed (2004) warns, affect can reinforce normative structures and exclude dissenting narratives. The emotional aesthetic of sustainability can comfort consumers into complacency, displacing systemic critique in favor of stylized ease. Thus, affect serves not only as a mode of engagement but as a grammar of political ambivalence.
In sum, emotional aesthetics in influencer culture comprise a semiotic and affective system that links feeling to moral meaning. Through style, tone and mood, influencers render sustainability desirable, intelligible and culturally resonant. These performances transform interior states into symbolic capital, enabling ethical consumption to circulate not only as behavior but as affective identity.
The Cultural Labor of Influence and the Performance of Ethical Selves
Influencers are not merely persuasive agents; they are symbolic laborers who perform and aestheticize ethical subjectivities. Acting as moral entrepreneurs, they embed values such as care, responsibility and critique into the everyday visual expression of sustainability (Barbeta-Viñas, 2023). This labor involves the fusion of public visibility with personal ethics, and of emotional resonance with strategic performance. Kapoor (2024) and Duffy and Hund (2015) refer to this hybrid role as cultural labor, the production of identity, affect and symbolic meaning under platform capitalism.
In this context, sustainability becomes a matter of atmospheric coherence rather than behaviorist persuasion. As Colucci and Pedroni (2022) argue, influencers frame sustainability as a felt identity experienced through mood, texture, rhythm and emotional tonality rather than argument. Sun and Ding (2024) call this mode of interaction affective engagement, in which sentiments such as indignation, compassion, or ethical fatigue are not simply expressed but curated to build alignment with audiences and brands. These emotions become strategic intensities, modulated performances that allow influencers to sustain attention while communicating ethical value.
Frig and Jaakkola (2023) emphasize the stratification of this affective labor across influencer tiers. Nano-influencers often convey emotional proximity and narrative vulnerability, which enhances perceptions of sincerity and moral conviction. By contrast, macro-influencers tend to adopt stylized detachment, relying on abstraction, symbolic gestures and brand-aligned imagery. This differentiation aligns with what Scott et al. (2024) define as symbolic intermediation: the substitution of emotional charisma and visual consistency for formal expertise or institutional legitimacy.
These performances are governed by aesthetic expectations and normative scripts. Febrian (2024) highlights how influencers cultivate visual authority – credibility that emerges not from knowledge or transparency, but from coherent displays of emotion, spatial intimacy and stylistic discipline. Pedroni (2022) describes how influencers deploy performative silences (intentional omissions or hesitations around promotional content) as a form of role distancing that preserves authenticity. Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical framework helps clarify how such tactics serve to manage impressions and negotiate moral ambiguity in a commercialized field.
Among Gen Z audiences, these semiotic cues are read as mooded morality, a perceptual system in which sincerity is not stated but sensed (Nixon, 2020). For this demographic, symbolic acts of non-consumption, aesthetic minimalism, or emotionally inflected critique function as expressions of ethical distinction. These markers construct identity through affective alignment rather than ideological coherence.
The result is what might be called value dramaturgy: a stylized orchestration of ethical commitments that unfolds within visual, affective and algorithmic logics. Influencers do not merely promote sustainable consumption; they perform ethical selves through emotional and symbolic labor. This labor situates sustainability as a mode of identity-making, enabling it to circulate not just as a practice, but as a cultural resource for belonging, distinction and moral expression.
Aesthetic Labor and the Curation of Sustainable Lifestyles
Aesthetic labor is central to how influencers construct and communicate sustainability. It involves more than the production of visually pleasing content: it demands the curation of ethical atmospheres and emotionally resonant lifestyles (Colucci & Pedroni, 2022). This labor is affective, symbolic and performative: influencers must demonstrate stylistic fluency, emotional coherence and cultural adaptability across shifting platform environments. Frig and Jaakkola (2023) describe this process as ethical aestheticization, whereby specific visual grammars, such as minimalism, soft lighting, organic textures and slow pacing, function as indicators of environmental virtue and emotional self-regulation.
These grammars reflect and reinforce Bourdieu’s (1984) theory of distinction, wherein aesthetic style serves as a proxy for moral clarity and cultural legitimacy. Barbeta-Viñas (2023) emphasizes that such stylistic cues – slowness, care and simplicity – function as moral registers, signaling refined taste and ethical intention. These markers are not purely expressive; they are shaped by the algorithmic architectures of visibility. As Airoldi and Rokka (2022) note, social media platforms systematically reward emotionally consistent, visually coherent content, conditioning the parameters of influence and amplifying particular aesthetic codes.
Navigating this environment requires influencers to manage the tension between emotional authenticity and algorithmic performance. Pedroni (2022) highlights how influencers must calibrate their aesthetic strategies to remain emotionally compelling while avoiding perceived overproduction or insincerity. The goal is to produce content that feels intimate and spontaneous while meeting the platform’s implicit standards of engagement and circulation.
Febrian (2024) contributes the notion of visual authority, a mode of credibility derived not from informational expertise, but from stylistic cohesion and symbolic presence. Through close framing, soft gestures and spatial intimacy, influencers construct moral legitimacy as an aesthetic effect. Similarly, Sun and Ding (2024) discuss how influencers generate affective atmospheres that mediate ethical subjectivity through spatial-emotional design. In this context, sustainability is not argued but felt: it is presented through carefully staged visual environments that encode moral values into sensorial experience.
These practices amount to what may be described as curated moodscapes: stylistically unified representations of ethical living that are emotionally legible and socially shareable. Influencers function as visual dramaturgs, orchestrating coherence across gesture, tone and symbol. Their aesthetic labor is not ancillary, it is constitutive of their ability to communicate sustainability as a culturally desirable narrative.
In sum, aesthetic labor enables sustainability to be experienced as a symbolic economy of taste, ethics and platform visibility. Through consistent emotional tone and visual discipline, influencers render sustainability performable, relatable and aspirational, transforming ecological commitments into lifestyle aesthetics that circulate as identity resources within contemporary consumer culture.
Symbolic Consumption, Identity Formation and the Spectacle of Sustainability
Sustainability in influencer culture functions as both an identity-making practice and a public spectacle. Ethical consumption becomes a tool for self-stylization, performed through symbolic markers, affective codes and aesthetic routines that transform private values into visible, curated selves (Barbeta-Viñas, 2023; Colucci & Pedroni, 2022). Nixon (2020) and Bauman (2007) suggest that such symbolic acts of non-consumption or minimalist performance can stabilize identity within the fluid, accelerated dynamics of late modern consumer culture.
In this symbolic economy, influencers do not simply advocate for behavioral change; they curate sustainability as an emotionally coherent and visually codified spectacle. Frig and Jaakkola (2023) and Alkkiomäki et al. (2024) argue that sustainability is increasingly aestheticized into stylized scripts of ethical living, where moral complexity is simplified into affective practices that are easy to emulate and circulate. Sun and Ding (2024) highlight how even activism becomes absorbable within platform logics, as influencers align political sentiment with brand performance and audience expectations. These practices compress structural critiques into emotionally manageable content, rendering sustainability legible through style rather than discourse.
Platform architectures further consolidate this tendency. Airoldi and Rokka (2022) demonstrate that algorithmic visibility is contingent upon emotional resonance and aesthetic consistency, shaping which forms of ethical identity gain traction. As a result, ethical content is selected not only for its normative value but also for its platform optimization. Gerhards (2025) identifies this condition as “tainted morality,” in which authenticity and ethical commitments are subordinated to performance metrics and algorithmic success.
Within this ecosystem, ethical subjectivity becomes commodified. Symbols such as refillable bottles, wooden utensils, thrifted garments and earthy palettes become semiotic signs of sustainability, signaling affiliation with a moral lifestyle. However, Barbeta-Viñas (2023) warns that such aestheticization risks hollowing out the critical force of sustainability discourse. By offering stylized tranquility rather than systemic critique, influencers may comfort audiences into complacency. The influencer thus occupies an ambivalent position, as both a participant in and a curator of the consumer spectacle they inhabit.
Sustainability, then, operates simultaneously as spectacle and strategy. As spectacle, it dramatizes ethical intention through stylized performance. As strategy, it allows influencers to accumulate symbolic capital, navigate cultural anxieties and engage followers through emotionally navigable scripts. What results is a performative-symbolic economy in which sustainability is not only practiced but consumed, rendered affectively coherent, visually shareable and politically ambiguous.
Methodology
Considering the limited scholarly attention to sustainability communication by Portuguese digital influencers, this study aims to: (1) examine how sustainability is articulated by influencers on Instagram in Portugal; (2) investigate whether different categories of influencers (mega, macro, micro, nano) adopt distinct aesthetic, narrative and symbolic strategies; and (3) explore how such communication is perceived, interpreted and emotionally processed by Generation Z consumers. The research is guided by the following primary and secondary questions:
Given the exploratory nature of these questions and the lack of prior empirical work in this specific national and cultural context, a qualitative, mixed-methods design was adopted. This includes two interconnected studies: (1) a visual-verbal video analysis (VVVA) of Instagram content produced by influencers across four stratified tiers; and (2) a focus group study with Portuguese Gen Z consumers to capture audience interpretations, emotional responses and symbolic meaning-making related to influencer-driven sustainability communication. These studies are detailed below.
It is important to note that this research is informed by a critical–interpretive epistemology that acknowledges the researcher’s positionality as part of the meaning-making process. As scholars in media and communication with research experience in sustainability discourse and digital culture, we recognize that our interpretations are shaped by both academic expertise and everyday familiarity with social media environments. To ensure analytical transparency and mitigate bias, data coding and theme development were discussed collaboratively and cross-checked through intercoder validation.
Study 1
Methodology
The first phase of the research involved a qualitative video content analysis of Instagram posts using the Visual-Verbal Video Analysis (VVVA) method developed by Fazeli et al. (2023). This model is particularly suited for cultural and social inquiry into video-based communication, as it enables researchers to interpret the interplay of visual, verbal, emotional and symbolic modes within digital media content. Grounded in Multimodality Theory and Visual Grounded Theory, VVVA allows for the layered analysis of meaning across speech, gesture, facial expression, spatial design and aesthetic composition.
The VVVA process comprises six methodological steps: (1) collecting, organizing and reviewing data; (2) transcribing verbal content; (3) selecting analytical units; (4) coding multimodal features; (5) interpreting data patterns; and (6) reporting findings. For data collection, Instagram Reels posted during 2025 were sampled. The final dataset consisted of 10 videos from each of five Portuguese influencers in four tiers – mega, macro, micro and nano – for a total of 200 videos. Influencer identities were anonymized for ethical considerations. Profiles were identified as influencers based on visible indicators of professional or semi-professional content creation, such as follower count, verified or public accounts, branded collaborations, or sponsored posts. Selection followed a purposive sampling strategy to ensure variation in audience reach, thematic focus and engagement with sustainability-related content. Criteria included consistent posting activity between 2022 and 2024 and at least five posts explicitly referencing environmental or sustainable lifestyle topics. Tier classification followed follower count benchmarks as defined earlier. In addition to follower count and content focus, engagement metrics (such as average interactions per post and frequency of uploads) were reviewed to confirm the influencers’ active and sustained presence on the platform. These measures ensured that selected profiles represented consistent and visible actors within the Portuguese Instagram ecosystem, thereby reinforcing the analytical validity of the tier-based comparison.
The sampling process also revealed a structural imbalance in the Portuguese influencer ecosystem: sustainability-related content is relatively scarce among mega-influencers, who primarily focus on lifestyle and commercial promotion. Accordingly, no profiles meeting the follower-count threshold and producing consistent sustainability content were excluded; rather, their limited representation reflects existing patterns in the national digital landscape.
Transcriptions were generated using Google AI Studio and manually verified to ensure accuracy. Analytical focus was placed on multimodal and affective cues, including overall composition, camera framing, tone of voice, body language, emotional expression, thematic framing and symbolic associations. The unit of analysis was the video as a holistic communication artifact, interpreted in relation to its aesthetic grammar, narrative coherence and ethical signification.
Through iterative coding, the data were categorized to reveal patterns in how sustainability was framed across influencer tiers, with attention to the relationship between visual form, verbal narrative, and perceived authenticity or ethical positioning.
Analysis
Regarding Portuguese mega-influencers, Table 1 presents the main insights.
Mega-Influencers Analysis.
The cinematic production of mega-influencer 1 contrasts with the lifestyle-documentary formats employed by mega-influencers 3 and 4. In terms of content, these influencers evoke distinct emotional appeals: admiration (mega-influencer 1), aspiration (mega-influencer 2), empathy (mega-influencer 3), vitality (mega-influencer 4) and resilience (mega-influencer 5).
Overall, mega-influencers construct market-oriented, emotionally nuanced identities that reinforce consumerist aspirations. While they differ in tone – ranging from empowering and reflective to humorous – they uniformly rely on highly polished multimodal presentations. Their content consistently communicates personal success, beauty and resilience, promoting individualistic consumption patterns rather than structural or ecological alternatives. Sustainability is largely absent or subordinated to narratives of personal well-being and aesthetic self-fashioning. Only minor traces of mindful living are present, particularly in the content of mega-influencers 3 and 5, yet these remain underdeveloped.
Table 2 presents the main interpretations for the macro-influencers:
Macro-Influencers Analysis.
In terms of modes, macro-influencers generally integrate music, domestic settings, food, stylized fashion and emotional monologues, supporting strong symbolic identification with Portuguese cultural norms. These influencers produce emotionally charged yet culturally grounded content, exploring affective domains such as family, gender, public discourse and aspiration. Through localized intimacy and vernacular storytelling (across both visual and verbal modalities) they perform roles that blend authenticity with aspiration, navigating domestic and civic spheres. This is particularly evident among macro-influencers 2, 3 and 4, who use their platforms for lifestyle modeling and forms of soft activism.
Only a subset demonstrates a clear engagement with sustainability, most notably macro-influencer 2, and to a lesser extent macro-influencer 4. The remaining figures primarily contribute to cultural reproduction rather than critical reflection, emphasizing emotion, aesthetics and brand alignment over ecological or structural concerns.
Regarding micro-influencers, Table 3 summarizes the findings.
Micro-Influencers Analysis.
Each operates as a micro-cultural agent, articulating slow, embodied and ethical narratives that resist mainstream influencer paradigms. These micro-influencers foreground values such as care, locality, reflection and interdependence, directly challenging the fast-paced, consumption-driven norms of social media culture. As ethical narrators of alternative lifestyles, they employ intimate, slow and symbolically rich modes to promote sustainability not merely as practice, but as lifestyle, mind-set and identity.
Their content subverts conventional attention economies and mass branding by encouraging conscious consumption, ecological literacy and heightened self-awareness. Among all influencer categories in the dataset, they exhibit the strongest alignment with sustainable consumer culture, functioning not only as influencers but also as cultural mediators and critical educators.
Finally, the information regarding nano-influencers is presented on Table 4.
Nano-Influencers Analysis.
Regarding multimodal and visual strategies, organic soundscapes and intentional silence contribute to a contemplative aesthetic. Low-budget production values are not perceived as limitations but rather as deliberate rhetorical choices that emphasize authenticity and presence. Within this framework, the nano-influencer group exhibits a convergence of ecological, psychological and social ethics in the construction of their messages.
Nano-influencers function as radical micro-mediators of sustainable values. They employ affective narration and symbolic resistance to challenge dominant paradigms, utilize low-friction multimodalities to foster intimacy and resonance, and demonstrate a clear alignment with principles of slow media, ecological justice and social repair. While sharing similarities with micro-influencers, nano-influencers are distinguished by a more explicitly politicized and localized stance. They operate within alternative epistemological frameworks, such as eco-spirituality, grassroots science and queer ecology, articulating sustainability through deeply embedded cultural and ethical worldviews.
The analysis revealed a stratified symbolic economy of sustainability communication across influencer categories, differentiated by aesthetic grammar, production value and thematic emphasis. Within this sample, mega-influencers tended to produce high-end, cinematic content with polished visuals and professional editing. Their aesthetic is often heroic, branded and aspirational, aligning with a legacy-oriented and promotional style that prioritizes visibility and symbolic dominance. These influencers frequently integrate background music, dramatic cuts and calls to action, mobilizing affect through spectacle and institutional polish.
In contrast, macro-influencers typically displayed a semi-professional and culturally grounded aesthetic. Their content blends humor, fashion, parenting and lifestyle themes, often framed in urban or domestic settings. The visual language here is emotionally accessible and culturally coded, balancing relatability with symbolic coherence. Their narratives often favored testimonial formats and visual motifs of daily life, signaling authenticity through stylized normalcy.
Among the analyzed profiles, micro-influencers commonly emphasized aesthetic minimalism and subcultural stylization. Their content is marked by abstract visuals, poetic narration and experimental formats. Here, sustainability is often framed through vulnerability, self-reflection and artistic critique, embedding environmental themes in personal identity narratives. Symbolic and affective cues are deliberately subtle, appealing to audiences through nuance rather than clarity.
Nano-influencers in this dataset adopted a raw, intimate and politically conscious mode of communication. Their videos feature direct-to-camera speech, minimal editing and nature-based visuals. They draw on affective sincerity and relational proximity to construct emotionally charged, ethically invested narratives. Common themes include environmental justice, well-being, political critique and decolonial perspectives, positioning sustainability as a form of resistance and lived ethics rather than a lifestyle aesthetic.
Overall, the findings indicate that sustainability communication is not uniform, but mediated through stratified regimes of symbolic capital, aesthetic labor and emotional resonance. Influencer categories operate as cultural strata, each performing a distinct function in the symbolic ecology of digital sustainability, from spectacle to intimacy, from promotion to politicization. Sustainability engagement varies widely: among mega-influencers, it is either absent or commodified (e.g., linked to fitness technologies); among macro-influencers, it is sporadic and often marginal. In contrast, sustainable discourse is central to the messaging and identity construction of micro-influencers, and foundational – as well as explicitly articulated – within the nano-influencer category.
Finally, the narrative roles performed by these influencers reflect their sociocultural positioning. Mega-influencers function as global cultural icons of success; macro-influencers serve as nationally visible public figures. Micro-influencers operate as critical niche communicators, while nano-influencers emerge as ethical storytellers engaged in alternative and activist forms of mediation.
Study 2
Methodology
To explore Generation Z’s perceptions of influencer-mediated sustainability communication on Instagram, four focus groups were conducted in early 2025 with 29 Portuguese participants (18 female, 11 male), aged 19–25. All were active Instagram users who followed Portuguese influencers. Participants were recruited through university mailing lists and social media announcements. Most were university students based in Lisbon, with others coming from neighboring districts or families residing in more distant regions of Portugal, ensuring broader geographic diversity. Ethical research protocols were followed to guarantee informed consent, confidentiality and participant welfare. While not selected for representativeness, participants reflected varied levels of engagement with sustainability, ranging from habitual eco-consumers to those with limited awareness or interest.
Discussion prompts were designed to elicit reflections on the symbolic, affective and behavioral dimensions of sustainability content, drawing from theoretical themes identified in the literature review. These prompts were directly derived from the study’s research questions (RQs 1–1.5), translating their focus on communication, performance and interpretation into open-ended questions that invited participants to describe, evaluate and emotionally respond to sustainability content. Transcripts were recorded via Google AI Studio and manually verified for accuracy. A thematic analysis was conducted to identify interpretive patterns and affective responses.
Focus groups followed a semi-structured, memory-based format in which participants recalled sustainability-related influencer content personally familiar to them. No curated videos were shown; instead, moderators encouraged discussion of specific influencers, naturally covering different tiers of visibility. This approach captured spontaneous interpretations rather than reactions to predefined stimuli.
Analysis
A recurring theme was the situational and selective nature of sustainable behavior. Participants often described their actions as habit-driven, financially constrained, or inherited rather than ideologically motivated. Statements such as “I just go with what I’m used to” (Participant 26) and “I grew up on a farm, so eating natural food is just normal” (Participant 24) illustrate a non-reflexive sustainability, shaped more by routine than by conscious identity work. This suggests that for many, sustainability is practiced without symbolic self-labelling, complicating the influencer’s role as a moral guide.
Another prominent theme was skepticism and semantic ambiguity. Participants expressed confusion about the meaning and credibility of terms like “sustainable” or “eco-friendly.” Comments such as “Sustainable. . . in what sense?” (Participant 3) and “Some of those green products are just marketing” (Participant 15) highlight a general mistrust of green branding and a recognition of greenwashing as a discursive strategy rather than a reflection of authentic ethical practice.
Participants also emphasized relational influence over direct persuasion. Sustainable behaviors were more often attributed to the habits of family members, romantic partners, or broader social media trends than to the influence of specific content creators. For instance, “I eat what my girlfriend eats – that’s how I got into more plant-based stuff” (Participant 25) and “I didn’t follow a specific influencer. Everyone was doing it” (Participant 28) reflect a diffuse model of influence, embedded in social proximity rather than aspirational authority.
Distrust toward influencers emerged as a critical issue, particularly around perceived contradictions and aesthetic overproduction. Participants reacted negatively to influencers who promoted sustainability while endorsing fast fashion or other unsustainable practices. “She posts eco-products but then promotes fast fashion. That doesn’t match” (Participant 3) and “They act sustainable but don’t even recycle” (Participant 6) underscore concerns about symbolic inconsistency, which undermines influencer credibility.
Authenticity was consistently prioritized over visual polish. Participants favored content that appeared “real,” “imperfect,” or “simple,” finding curated perfection to be emotionally unconvincing. “It has to be small, real things – not staged content” (Participant 7) and “Perfectly styled sustainability posts just don’t feel believable” (Participant 4) illustrate a preference for affective sincerity over brand-like aesthetics. This reinforces the literature’s argument that emotional resonance and symbolic coherence outweigh production value in perceptions of credibility.
Finally, a subtle gendered pattern emerged. Female participants more frequently discussed sustainable beauty and fashion, while male participants tended to describe indirect adoption of sustainable habits via partners or household norms. As Participant 11 noted, “For women, sustainable cosmetics are easier to notice than clothing,” suggesting that gender mediates not only behavior but the visibility of sustainable practices.
In sum, the findings indicate that Generation Z’s sustainable consumption is shaped by habit, affective proximity, affordability and symbolic coherence, rather than direct messaging from influencers. While influencers may contribute to shaping sustainability discourse, their impact is mediated by social context and often undermined by performative contradictions. Authenticity, in this context, is judged not by production quality but by the perceived alignment between message and lifestyle – a crucial insight into how symbolic legitimacy is culturally negotiated in influencer culture.
Discussion and Conclusion
Study 1 revealed a clear stratification in sustainability narratives across influencer tiers, confirming the presence of a symbolic economy in which aesthetic labor, narrative coherence and affective expression are unequally distributed (Bourdieu, 1984; Colucci & Pedroni, 2022). This stratification illustrates how the symbolic labor of sustainability communication operates differently across influencer tiers. For mega- and macro-influencers, symbolic labor is oriented toward visibility and brand alignment, producing affective appeal through aspirational imagery. In contrast, micro- and nano-influencers engage in an ethical form of symbolic labor, where sustainability becomes a means of identity-making and cultural critique. These distinctions underscore how aesthetic coherence and emotional resonance function as mechanisms through which moral meaning is performed and perceived.
Mega-influencers cultivated branded, aspirational identities aligned with spectacular consumption, often absent of explicit sustainability messaging. Their content, characterized by polished production and commercial aesthetics, mirrors the logics of emotional commodification that sustain influencer capitalism (Frig & Jaakkola, 2023).
Macro-influencers blended lifestyle narratives with culturally grounded emotional tropes, reinforcing authenticity through selective intimacy. However, sustainability remained marginal, suggesting an adherence to symbolic forms of soft activism rather than systemic critique. These dynamics echo Barbeta-Viñas’s (2023) notion of emotional governance, where symbolic affect serves to legitimate moral positioning without engaging in structural interrogation.
In contrast, micro- and nano-influencers performed a more coherent form of cultural labor (Duffy & Hund, 2015), embedding sustainability into ethical identity narratives through visual minimalism, poetic narration and deliberate affective pacing. This performativity was not only aesthetic but political: micro-influencers framed sustainability through intersectional narratives (e.g., ecological feminism, ancestral wisdom), while nano-influencers drew from eco-spirituality, queer ecology and degrowth discourse, aligning their symbolic production with activist epistemologies. Their practices resonate with Ahmed’s (2010) concept of affective economies, where feelings “stick” to sustainability symbols to make ethical meaning tangible.
These findings deepen the theoretical lens on aesthetic coherence: across tiers, the perceived legitimacy of sustainability depends on the capacity to maintain visual and emotional consistency. Aesthetic coherence, as defined in the theoretical framework, emerges here not only as a stylistic principle but as an ethical performance, an organizing device that translates affect into moral credibility. This coherence allows influencers to transform symbolic labor into emotional capital within platform economies.
When read alongside these production-side dynamics, the audience data from Study 2 reveal a complementary perspective on how symbolic labor is interpreted and negotiated. Whereas micro- and nano-influencers perform sustainability as emotional and ethical labor, participants in the focus groups evaluated such performances through perceived sincerity and coherence between message and lifestyle. This convergence indicates that affective strategies succeed when symbolic and emotional registers align: authenticity is recognized not by factual validation, but by the affective harmony between the influencer’s tone, aesthetic and lived ethos.
Study 2 further illuminated the cultural logic of influencer credibility. Generation Z participants evaluated sustainability content through the lens of affective sincerity and symbolic coherence, echoing Pedroni’s (2021) notion of “trustworthy distance.” Authenticity emerged not as a fixed trait but as a performance judged by emotional transparency, behavioral consistency, and alignment between message and lifestyle, an understanding of authenticity as cultural capital rather than moral essence (Bourdieu, 1984; Scott et al., 2024).
Participants’ preference for everyday, emotionally honest representations over stylized content reflects a shift toward relational trust as a more valuable currency than visibility. Their skepticism toward greenwashing and branding logics underscores the risk of ethical incoherence, which undermines the symbolic legitimacy of influencer narratives. These responses show that influence is not exerted through persuasion alone but negotiated within broader cultural scripts, social contexts and economic constraints.
Bringing both studies together, the analysis demonstrates a reciprocal relationship between production and reception: influencers generate affective meaning through symbolic labor, while audiences decode that labor through emotional literacy shaped by skepticism and media experience. This integration underscores that the affective economy of sustainability influence is co-produced, a dialogical process in which credibility and emotional resonance are continually negotiated between creators and consumers.
Overall findings reveal that sustainability on Instagram is not a monolithic message but a contested symbolic field, in which different influencer tiers perform distinct roles in the affective mediation of ethical values. Mega-influencers enact the spectacle of aspiration; macro-influencers trade in emotionally coded familiarity; micro-influencers curate ethical critique; and nano-influencers stage resistance through narrative intimacy and politicized aesthetics.
Thus, the influencer’s role should be understood not as a behavioral manipulator but as a symbolic and affective intermediary, a figure who curates meaning at the intersection of aesthetics, emotion and moral imagination. For Generation Z, sustainability is not consumed as doctrine but experienced as a feeling structure, where mood, coherence and perceived sincerity determine what counts as credible or worthy of attention. In this context, the performance of ethical subjectivity becomes central: credibility lies not in claims but in the convergence of identity, message and emotional resonance.
Taken together, these results demonstrate how symbolic labor, aesthetic coherence and emotional resonance interact to produce the cultural legitimacy of sustainable influence. The synthesis of these dimensions shows that influence operates through affective mediation rather than informational authority: sustainability becomes credible when it feels emotionally aligned, visually coherent and symbolically consistent with the influencer’s perceived ethical self.
This study contributes to cultural consumer research by showing how digital sustainability is aestheticized, stratified and emotionally coded, and how its meaning is negotiated in a platformed symbolic economy. It foregrounds the importance of authenticity as a dynamic and relational construct, embedded in cultural hierarchies, algorithmic architectures, and emotional registers that shape the everyday moral experience of consumption.
Collectively, these findings address the study’s research questions by demonstrating how sustainability is communicated through multimodal aesthetic and affective strategies (RQ1–1.3) and how it is interpreted and negotiated by Generation Z audiences through emotional, relational and symbolic frameworks (RQ1.4–1.5). By linking these empirical insights to the broader theoretical lens of symbolic labor, aesthetic coherence and emotional resonance, the study advances understanding of how digital influence transforms sustainability into a culturally mediated and affectively experienced practice.
Ultimately, these findings reaffirm that influence is negotiated within a dynamic reception context: the symbolic legitimacy of sustainability communication remains fragile, contingent on how audiences interpret and emotionally invest in its meanings. This relational view of influence underscores that credibility in digital culture is never fixed but continuously co-produced through affective exchange between creators and publics.
Research Limitations and Suggestions for Future Research
Study 1 centers solely on Instagram, overlooking how sustainability might be communicated differently on other platforms such as TikTok, YouTube or Twitter, which may appeal to different segments of Generation Z. Also, the analysis is based on videos published in 2025 only, offering a snapshot rather than a longitudinal perspective. The limited sample of Study 2 may not capture the full diversity of Generation Z in Portugal, especially across different socioeconomic, regional or ethnic backgrounds.
Future research could explore how sustainability is communicated and received across different social media platforms. This would provide insights into platform-specific affordances and audience dynamics. Also, complementing qualitative findings with quantitative metrics (such as engagement statistics, follower demographics and click-through rates) would enhance the robustness of conclusions about influence effectiveness.
Footnotes
Author contributions
Conceptualization: A.C.B.
Data curation: A.C.B.
Formal analysis: A.C.B., N.B., A.P.
Funding acquisition: A.P.
Investigation: A.C.B., N.B., A.P.
Methodology: A.C.B., N.B., A.P.
Project administration: A.C.B.
Resources: A.C.B., A.P.
Software Supervision: A.C.B., N.B.
Validation: A.C.B., N.B., A.P.
Visualization: A.C.B.
Writing – original draft: A.C.B., N.B.
Writing – review & editing: A.C.B., N.B., A.Ps.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: NECE and this work are supported by FCT–Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, I.P. by project reference UIDB/04630/2020 and DOI identifier 10.54499/UIDP/04630/2020
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of generative AI and AI-assisted technologies in the writing process
During the preparation of this work the authors used Chat GPT to improve language and readability. After using this tool/service, the authors reviewed and edited the content as needed and take full responsibility for the content of the publication.