Impact of influencer marketing on consumer purchase intention

Abstract

Influencer marketing has been the current trend in all social media platforms. Since people are spending a lot of time on social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc. marketing techniques such as memes, influencers, etc has seen enormous growth in the COVID era. Therefore brands are spending a good amount of their budget on these kinds of marketing. We felt that influencers are the first point of contact for users. Users see them every day on social media and start relating with them. Users generally follow the influencers who have the same interest area as them. Therefore, we felt there is enormous growth potential in influencer marketing and hence we created a hypothesis to understand them better. Our hypothesis mainly focuses on the impact of influencer marketing on brand engagement and consumer purchase intention. We've taken examples of apparel since clothing is one of the highest content industries on social media. To test the hypothesis, we floated a survey and experiment through Qualtrics. Our survey contains a question to gaze at the purchase intention of users after watching influencer post and whether users want to engage with the brand. At the end of the survey, we asked for demographic questions such as age, gender to know more about the respondent profile. Finally, for Hypothesis testing, we used SPSS and run ANOVA, and regression to know the impact and significance among the variables. We have identified some implications of the result we got through SPSS. So, analyzed the results of each hypothesis and suggested recommendations to improve them. From our study, we get to know that influencer marketing currently has not that much impact on brand engagement which it should have. Therefore, we suggested some workarounds to brands through which they can strengthen their brand engagement game via influencer marketing.