| dc.description.abstract | The main purpose of this master thesis is to examine whether non paid social media influencers with informative content have a positive effect on evaluation measured as consumers’ purchase intentions, attitudes and loyalty. Our research is focused on existing theories on influencer marketing, consumer behavior, source credibility and trust. To investigate these effects, we conducted a quantitative research strategy with a survey and an experiment. The experiment implemented involved interventions or manipulations of two types of social media influencers (paid Vs non-paid) each with two types of content (informative Vs entertaining) on YOUTUBE social media platform, and the survey was distributed to our own social media network. The final sample included 158 participants and the findings were partially unexpected as there was no statistical significance to support the hypotheses 1 and 2, suggesting a higher effect of non-paidon evaluation, nor a lower effect of the paid on evaluation, thus both hypotheses were rejected. Moreover, hypothesis 5a was partially accepted, in this hypothesis we had significance only for information moderating the mediation effect of credibility but not for trust between the non-paid influencers and purchase intentions, however the moderation of information on the mediation effect of both credibility and trust between non paid and attitudes and loyalty were not significant, hence hypotheses 5b and c were rejected, thus since the results proved that trust
is not affect by the content informativeness for all the dependent variables measuring evaluation (purchase intentions, attitudes and loyalty), we considered trust as a borderline to non-paid influencers information content. Nevertheless, the hypotheses 3, 4, 6 and 7 were accepted since results were significant hence supported previous research. Further explanations were discussed and involved among others, the failure of the manipulations checks as we concluded that respondents didn’t perceive the manipulations in the way they were intended which could have impacted their responses, also could that be due eventually to the participants being exposed to influencers they are not following or not interested in, as in our experiment we chose the influencers, the content and the brand on their behalf. All in all as we think the effect of non-paid social media influencers on evaluation might exist, future research within this topic taking into consideration out limitations are recommended to investigate our results as they could lead to more significant results. | |