Research background - 網路紅人對追隨者影響之研究：以泰國使用者為例

Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 Research background

Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 Research background

Celebrity endorsements have always been a popular tool among marketers in promoting their brands, products and services as it can transfer celebrity’s characteristics and image onto the brand. Also it can improve consumer purchase intention and use the product or service that endorsed by celebrity (Djafarova & Rushworth, 2017). There have been confirms by many studies that celebrity endorsement can significantly increase effectiveness of the advertisements (Atkin &

Block, 1983). However, in the present many companies are switching from using traditional celebrities to micro-influencer such as Instagram influencer, vloggers, Youtuber to endorse their brands. The traditional celebrity that have professional talent such as athlete, actor, actress, singer and so forth is able to gain their public recognition in contrast with micro-influencer that gains fame by promoting themselves as expert in some way though social platform such as Instagram, Facebook, Youtube and so forth. According from the previous study influencer endorsement would also result in a higher advertising effectiveness rather than celebrity endorsement (Schouten, Janssen, & Verspaget, 2020) .

The studies (Schouten et al., 2020) (Djafarova & Rushworth, 2017) suggest that influencer have a stronger impact on purchase behavior and attitude of the brand of young consumers than traditional celebrities as Consumers also feel more familiar to social media influencer and trust influencers more than traditional celebrities. (Warner, 2018) Research shows that consumers are tend to listen to the suggestion or recommendation from the person they are relate to. Instagram celebrities had high relationship in engagement and purchase intentions if we compare with other celebrities or influencer such blogger and traditional celebrities.

Before the internet era, marketers promote their good or service in different way such as TV, radio newspaper, magazine as it could reach large scale of audience. Nowadays social media is evolving such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and so forth. The way the brands marketing their product or service have been changed. In the past, the product or service was mainly introduced in offline channel such as television advertising, billboard, magazine and so forth. According to the Internetworldstats (table 1) , there are roughly 4.3 million internet user or accounting 56 percent of world population and it tend to increase in the future. From Techjury data, at present internet user an average of 2 hours 22 minutes surfing online and most popular online platform are Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and so forth.

Instagram is one of the most interesting social media platforms. In 2018 Instagram users worldwide reached 1 billion and more than 63% of people that can access to internet have owned the Instagram user account with more than 400 million active daily users where they spend 53 minutes using in average per day on this platform. The biggest social media platform – Facebook, 2.23 billion people are active monthly users on Facebook and spend 43 minutes per day on Facebook and it increased by 7 minutes when compared to the rates in 2014. Therefore, social media has become a powerful influence on our daily activities and would also affect our decision making on what we buy, what we like. Where to go, what to eat. Marketers see the benefits associated with social media marketing and the research from KOL marketing showed that overall percent of marketers determine to focus more on the advertising activity on social media in 2019 and by the survey – 74% of marketers claim that they will increase the investment in Instagram and 60% cited in Facebook. Zenith had also published the forecasts for advertising expenditure marketers’ report and it shows that total spending of social media is anticipated to escalate from

$48 billion to $76 billion in 2020. With the growth in social media platform that certainly influence agencies to allocate more resources to social media platform. One of the widely use strategies in recent years is using Micro-Influencers or influencer marketing. This ascertainment is to essay the impact of perceived expertise, number of followers of micro-influencer and level of product involvement purchase intention and brand trust.

Table 1 World internet usage and Population Statistics, MAY 2019

4 1.2 Research motivation

Existing scientific research data, there is previous study on influencer marketing where it studied the ascendant of different type of influencer, brand intimacy and sponsorship disclosure on purchase intention on social media platform. As a result, the impact of micro-influencer is more effective if comparing to traditional. It also reveals that micro influencer can positively convince on brand trust and purchase intention of the purchaser compare to traditional celebrities (Maria Kolarova, 2018). To enhance brand trust by using micro-influencer, the trustworthiness and expertise are the important factor. The previous research revealed that the physical figure or attractiveness of micro-influencer have no improving effect on brand trust and purchase intention, the attractiveness of an influencer only draws an attention of the audience but expertise and trust of the influencer would play an important role. When advertising celebrities have expertise knowledge or experience, the influencer or impact on purchase intention will greater than having credibility and attractiveness.

The expert’s recommendation can enhance the trust on the brand and purchase intention, also it helps to enhance the value and recognition of the brand or product .(Maddux & Rogers, 1980) which is corresponding with the study from (Ohanian, 1990) that characteristic source model which include expertise, trustworthiness and attractiveness and expertise was the only characteristic among other that had a positive influence on purchase intentions. The endorser can be highly credible electronic Word Of Mouth comparing to paid advertising (Abidin 2016). It can be more effective than traditional advertising due to the higher in credibility and authenticity which could leads to lower resistance to the message (de Vries, Gensler, and Leeflang 2012) .However, there are still some factor that could be mediate and have not been investigated

which are different tier of followers of an influencers and level of product involvement of the consumer. The previous study mentioned that familiar brand will be more influential comparing to unfamiliar brand in social setting. Therefore, combining both micro influencer and traditional celebrities is the most effective way for the marketers to increase purchase intention.

There are still some limitation as there is no investigate on how consumer perceive the number of followers on certain account and also people have different level of product involvement on specific products or services that somehow could influence purchase intention. Therefore, for marketer to use the highest number of influencer is might not be the most effective marketing strategy in different product or service The another limitation of previous study is when a familiar is presented one is tend be draw by their knowledge and experience of the brand, it simply mean that one are more likely to stick and has certain perception or attitude but unfamiliar brand affects the attitude towards the brands. Therefore, in this study aim to examine whether consumer perceive micro-celebrity with different follower base and product involvement on brand trust and purchase intention differently or not.

6 1.3 Research purpose

The purpose of this research is to comprehend the relationships between perceived expertise, number of followers of an influencer and product involvement on brand trust and purchase intention. Also exploring the effect of the moderating role of the follower base of a micro-influencer and level of product involvement in the relationship between perceived expertise of an influencer and purchase intention. There are total of 6 research questions as follow:

R1. Does perceived expertise directly influence purchase intention?

R2. Does perceived expertise indirectly influence purchase intention though mediation of brand trust?

R3. Does follower base of micro influencer moderate the relationship between perceived expertise and brand trust?

R4. Does follower base of micro influencer moderate the relationship between perceived expertise and purchase intention?

R5. Does product involvement moderate the relationship between perceived expertise and brand trust?

R6. Does product involvement moderate the relationship between perceived expertise and purchase intention?

Chapter 2 Literature Review

2.1 Introduction of Influencer Marketing

Marketers spend a large number of budgets on advertisement campaigns while does not acknowledge that the most persuading source to the consumers are the suggestions from the source, they are trust (Bughin, Doogan, Vetvik, 2010). Consumer tend to trust their peers. According to World-of-Mouth marketing association (2014) showed that up to 13% of sales are coming from word-of-mouth. defined word-of-mouth was defined by Westbrook in 1987 as an informal communication behavior about their involvement and experience about specific products or services and it is the characteristics of the brand that consumers share their experiences with each other (Westbrook, 1987). Influencer is considered as the person that has a large number of followers on their account. According to the research (Maria Kolarova, 2018), the micro-influencer is more effective than traditional celebrities as they positively affect on brant trust and purchase intention. Moreover, Micro influencer are perceived as more relatable. According to Nielsen report, 92% of consumers tend to believe suggestion from their family and friend so these day marketers try to utilize or capitalize by communicating their massage through micro influencer on social media platform. Most of the brand will contact with the influencer agencies where the agencies will try assisting the suitable influencer for each task. Using influencers marketing become commonly use. Also, consumer tend to embraces the behavior, action or opinion from the group that he or she wanted to be as the social identity of a consumer is determined by the certain group or community that consumers wanted to be part of (Nejad, M. G., Sherrell, D. L., & Babakus, E. ,2014).

An opinion leader is a person whore has the opinion about things such as product or services and would have big influence to other’s opinion. The definition of opinion leader was further defined by (Teramoto, Inoue, & Saito, 2005) that it is a person that can influencer people around the influencer using their personal communication, as opinion leader’s world-of-mouth will also motivate the audience to purchase certain products, services or brand. Therefore, marketers have been trying to utilize the use of opinion leader. The result from studies shows that opinion leaders can influence person’s purchase behavior by sending messages of their own using experience about the product or services and communicating to many kinds of people as network hub.

According from (Leal, Hor-Meyll, & de Paula Pessôa, 2014), opinion leader are person who has at least one of this characteristic which includes person who are a highly active member in the community, often participating and giving relevant contributions and people that have good taste. (De Veirman, Cauberghe, & Hudders, 2017) expressed that follower base of an individual on social platform (e.g. Instagram) may have an impact on their popularity that may make people consider them as an opinion leader, therefore an influencer on Instagram may also be referred as opinion leader as well. The most social platform that widely used by opinion leader is Instagram because it has a great immediacy and higher engagement rate if we compare with other social media platform (Casaló, Flavián and Ibáñez-Sánchez, 2018).

Instagram

Instagram is aa media sharing platform, it was created Kevin Systrom and Mike Kriegerby on 6 October 2010, it was initially introduced as an mobile pictures and photo sharing platform application with the purpose of taking photos and sharing to others users in the application where the users is able to apply different options such as filters and other effect on their photos and also

can share photos on other social media platform for example Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and so forth. In this present, Instagram is one of the most famous and well-known social media applications all over the world with having more than 1 billion monthly active users around the globe and rank the 3^rd place after Facebook and YouTube among social media platform. (Kallas 2 September 2019) . The media sharing sites such as Instagram or YouTube have an influence during the pre-service stage of customer journey since it would allow a user to share informative content while also reach large number of prospect customers. There are various of features that marketers use for generating communication during customer journey Zarrella (2010, 81-83).

● Organic Content: The first way is when the brand publish content in social media platform in their own account. The second is the social media user create and post media content such as text, pictures, video and so on in the social media platform.

● Digital Asset Optimization or DAO: The process to increase awareness of the customer by getting its existing content to appear in search engine result.

● Tags: An effective way to get more engagement. Tagging is the act of creating a tag on social media. For an example, A celebrity attached a label or tag to pictures or videos. Tags allows user to find content

● Hashtags: Keywords that are added on the posts by using # symbol. For an example, A celebrity used #chanelthailand (Figure 1), This hashtag is clickable and allow other users to go to the page that gather all other posts that use the same tags.

Figure 1 An example of Celebrity in Instagram

Instagram users in Thailand

According to the statistic from Naplolecat (Dec 2019), There were 12,143,000 users in Thailand in December 2019 which accounted for more than 17% of population in Thailand.

Women is accounted for 63.6% and the largest user group (4,500,000 users) is people aged between 18 and 24.

Figure 2 Instagram users in Thailand Source: NapoleonCat

2.2 Purchase intention

Most of the brand use well-known celebrities as their brand endorsement in their advertising in order to promote and increase brand awareness. Famous celebrities would able to build trust and enhance brand recognition of the consumers that would eventually increase the consumer purchase intention as well. Purchase intention is described as the attentive determination to acquire an exceptional brand by Spears and Singh (2004, p.56). The purchase intention concept is one of the most persuasive theories to understand the consumer behavior that is particularly the theory of rational action developed by Ajzen and Fishbein (1967, 1980).

There are two factors that would shape the intention of individual of the behavior which are the attitude and subjective norms. The behavioral belief and perceived favorable and unfavorable influence the attitude of an individual (Kotler & Keller, 2006, p. 194). Purchase intention can be branched into three groups which are unexpected purchasing, moderately planned

purchasing and fully expected purchasing. unexpected purchasing means buyers decide to buy certain products either services unintentionally in a shop or could be called as desire purchasing behavior. moderately planned purchasing means buyers decide which product category that need to be bought beforehand and selecting a certain goods together with make a decision later from the provider. Fully expected purchasing means consumers have finalized their own decision on which product and which brand they prefer to purchase aforetime entering into a store (Engel, et al. 1995).

H2: Greater levels of perceived influencer expertise will result in more positive attitudes toward purchase intention.

2.3 Brand trust

Brand trust is mentally visualized as an important success element of the brand (Morgan

& Hunt, 1994). The impulsive feeling can be occurred from customer consideration of its experience of certain brand which can be viewed as a long process (Arjun Chaudhuri & Holbrook, 2001). Cognitive brand trust is knowledge drive trust and may reduce emotional response as it could be contemplated as a subjective factor (Casalo et al., 2007). To determine whether the brand is trustworthy, Morrow et al. (2004) careful methodical thought can be used to measure. In the relationship marketing concept, Trust is an important key success factor of marketing effort (e.g., (Morgan & Hunt, 1994). Creating trust is one of the main goals of marketing and the way to do is creating the connection of consumer with the brand Hiscock (2001, p. 1).

(Arjun Chaudhuri & Holbrook, 2001) theorized brand trust as “the willingness of the average consumer to rely on the ability of the brand to perform its stated function”. The result of the previous study showed that the uniqueness, specific characteristics of the endorsers or celebrities can enhance brand trust (Lassoued & Hobbs, 2015)and word-of-mouth

communication also build an association around the brand that can also generate the positive impact on brand trust (Hajli, Shanmugam, Papagiannidis, Zahay & Rochard, 2017; Hudson, Huang, Roth & Madden, 2016) .In term of brand loyalty, brand trust also enhance brand loyalty (Delgado‐

Ballester & Luis Munuera‐Alemán, 2001) as it has the ability to build high valuable relationship (A. Chaudhuri & Holbrook, 2002).

H1: Greater levels of perceived influencer expertise will result in more positive attitudes toward brand trust.

H3: Brand trust has positive effect on purchase intention.

2.4 Perceived expertise

Expertise is defined as "authoritativeness" (McCroskey, 1966) , "competence" (Whitehead, 1968), "expertness" (Applbaum & Anatol, 1972). Expertise is an ability to make valid claims can be defined as influencer expertise that is perceived by audience (Hovland, Janis, & Kelley, 1953).

Influencer can be perceived by audience as a professional or expert the influencer shares their knowledge, experience or competency about certain things. The professional knowledge, recommendation and experience from advertising celebrities, it would have a major ascendant on purchase intention rather than attractiveness and credibility. The attractiveness, expertise and popularity can attract consumer in a short period of time and can increase purchase intention.

(Daneshvary & Schwer, 2000).

According to (Ohanian, 1990), endorser’s celebrity advertisement are divided in to three categories which are expertise, attractiveness and credibility and when the endorsers have is an expert or have great knowledge it could raise and have a significance impact on purchase intention

than endorser with credibility and attractiveness. Moreover, expertise was found to have the most influence factor that could affect customers’ attitude as opinion leader than credibility and attractiveness which will eventually lead to greater in purchase intention.

The trustworthiness of the advertisement resource is important. (Gotlieb & Sarel, 1991) stated that the effectiveness of the advertisement lies to the resource that presumed to commute the persuasive message to consumer whether it is perceived as credible or not. The previous research has investigated the source expertise and it expresses that the source’s perceived expertise positively affect on the changing of the attitude (Horaim Naccari, and Fatoullah 1974; Maddux and Rogers 1980; (Mills & Harvey, 1972); Ross 1973). Expertise is one of the dimensions of source trustworthiness as entitled by (Hovland et al., 1953). The dimension of expert for example

“expert”, “Knowledgeable”, "experienced," together with "qualified" is clearly indicated and that can be used to measure expertise of each person (Applbaum and AnatoI1972; Simpson and Kahler 198081; Wynn 1987).

2.5 Definition of micro- influencer

Becoming a microcelebrity entails “thinking of oneself as a celebrity, and treating others accordingly” (Marwick, 2013a, p. 115). Influencer marketing is the person who earn a huge number of followers on the social media platform. Keller and Berry (2003) determines that the influencers respecting the number of followers and reach as for them “influencers are well connected (and) have a significantly larger number of groups than the average (American)”. A great number of marketers recognize micro-influencers to be any Instagramer, blogger, snapchatter, youtuber and so on with highly engaged and relatively small follower base less than 100,000 (Mediakix, 2016).

The power of the influencers can be measured by the number of people of is following on influencer’s account. Fame is coming with power and to expand the power is easy by sharing photos, texts and video through their mobile device or PC (Ecmercer, 2015). According to (Marwick & boyd, 2011) ,Social media platform has given the opportunities for people to be

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