Social media influencers and their impact on customer's purchasing decision

Abstract

The significant growth of social media and its stars, i.e. social media influencers (SMI) in recent years have changed the way digital marketing works. These influencers have gradually become leaders among their peers when it comes to experience new products or services. Many brands have increased their budget spent on influence marketing strategy. However, not many fully understand how this strategy actually works and how to choose to a suitable influencer. The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of social media influencers on customer’s purchasing decision. Beauty industry in Vietnam was chosen as the research context. Match-up hypothesis was used as a theoretical framework to investigate the influence of two differ-ent variables: consumer-SMI congruence and product-SMI congruence on customer’s attitude to-ward the advertisement, brand and purchase intention. Data was collected via the online questionnaires and conducted by using covariance structure analysis and path analysis. Results indicate that both consumer-SMI congruence and product-SMI congruence had positive impact on customer’s attitude toward the advertisement. However, only product-SMI congruence was found to have influence on customer’s purchase intention. A positive attitude toward the advertisement also leads to positive attitude toward the brand and eventually positive purchase intention. The research’s findings are coherent with the results from previous studies. Demographic variables such as age, gender, frequently used social media, cosmetics purchase frequency and monthly cosmetics expense also play an important part on purchase intention. The findings suggest that social media influencer is a promising marketing strategy for increasing sales. Marketers should consider collaboration with those influencers whose characteristics match up with endorsed products or services.