Title
The effect of online celebrity generated content on consumer purchasing intention: the context of China
Abstract
Currently firms have realised that social media marketing as an emerging crucial way to expand their business in many aspects and also increase extra value for their brand by connecting more audiences from social media platforms and engaging potential customers to buy products and services through online advertisement such as publishing blogs, sending promotion posts and videos and attract website traffic.
However, despite of the wide use of social media marketing in SMEs business, international marketing and strategic management within different commercial activities, there are very limited academic literature about this novel marketing approach existed and meanwhile lack of analysing and evaluating methods toward outcomes from online social media marketing. This research will focus on Key opinion leaders (representative online celebrities) who play important roles in whole social marketing process and concentrate on their generated contents specially in sponsorship videos and promotion live-streaming advertising. Based on the previous research on this field about online celebrities and various digital advertising methods (Ashley and Tuten, 2015; Lin, Bruning and Swarna, 2018) ;Park and Lin, 2020) Author proposes to investigate relationships between latent constructs which adopted from trustworthiness(Ohanian, 1990; Erdogan, 1999 ;Amos, Holmes and Strutton, 2008) , attractiveness(Joseph, 1982; Erdogan, 1999; Till and Busler, 2000) and purchase intention(Goldsmith and Lafferty, 1999; Gong and Li, 2017; Chung and Cho, 2017) and evaluated each factors’ effect on consumer purchasing intention within the context of China. The study aims to make theoretical contribution about social media marketing and endorsement management, in addition to conclude managerial implications for SMEs and E-commerce practitioners which might be most suitable for utilising this newly marketing strategy to gathering audiences and customers at their initial stage.
This research contributes to the academic literature on influencer marketing and customer behaviour theory by providing deeper understanding on current crucial influencer on the social media as internet celebrities are more recognized and valued through marketing process. The study is researching on younger generation’s online shopping behaviour and to find out the relationship between this group customer with online internet celebrities on social media. Findings will show different factors which have effect on customer purchasing intention and specific research area was selected to compare and discuss latent factors also affect this marketing process.