A Study on the Impact of Social Media Influencers on Consumer Decision Making: An Empirical Investigation in Indian Context

Abstract

The study is one of its kind of new one in the field of social media influencer and consumer Decision-making research. From the earlier literature, it has become evident that the role of social media in consumer decision-making is not a new field of research and already contributing to the understanding of the influence of social media on customer intentions, attitudes and behaviours in pre-purchase situations. But the focus has shifted recently to the contribution and influence of social media celebrities, a.k.a social media influencers. They are very different from a traditional celebrity model and in some cases generate more honour and affiliations than a traditional celebrity. Here the focus of this study is how these not-so-celebrated people are influencing consumer behaviour, in both pre and post-purchase scenarios. The study has focused on two particular areas a. How social media influencers influence the pre-purchase decision making b. How social media reviews affect the post-purchase dissonance, whether they are negative or positive. The entire research framework has been based on the prior review of literature, right from the identification of the study to the hypothesis development and testing followed by results. The variables and scales have been taken from recent papers and the sample was reached through an online questionnaire due to the physical limitations of the pandemic. The findings are somewhat astonishing. According to the sample respondents, social media influencers' reputation plays a moderate role in the pre-purchase evaluation of products. But there is a mediating role of informational influence in the conformity part of the consumer before they look and agreed to purchase anything. Even some of the components of influencer character have a weak role in conformity and only become worthwhile when mediating through informational influence. Also, it was interesting to find that social media negative reviews increase post-purchase dissonance but positive reviews fail to decrease the effect. So, we can infer that people tend to get influenced more by negative news than positive ones, although we can’t generalize that. In the end further direction for research on the domain has been prescribed for scholars.