SOCIAL MEDIA INFLUENCERS’ EFFECT ON BUYING DECISION AMONG MALAYSIAN GEN Z OF FOOD AND BEVERAGE (F&B) PRODUCT AUTHOR: KHAIRIL
Keywords:
Generation Z, Social Media, Social Media Influencer, Buying Decision, Food and Beverage, Credibility, Para-Social Interaction, Attractiveness.Abstract
Huge amount of food businesses using social media marketing platform to market and engage with their customer in recent years. The new social media influencers trend has caused some disruptive in social media marketing platform with an ability to create marginal revenue for businesses. This phenomenon has attracted many SMEs and big companies from Food and Beverage (F&B) to ride along the wave too. This research was conducted to find out how Malaysian Gen Z’s behave towards social media influencers in making a buying decision of F&B product using central route (Influencer’s Credibility) and peripheral route (Influencer’s PSI and Attractiveness) in Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) framework. 133 online survey questionnaires were collected among Gen Z in Selangor that is a follower of at least one food influencer. Data were analyzed using Correlation, Multiple Regression and ANOVA in SPSS software. The result shows, Instagram and YouTube are the preferred platform which are being used to follow at least one food influencer. The final analysis founds out that only Influencer’s Credibility with a significant p-value of 0.006 found to have a prediction power towards buying decision of F&B product among Gen Z in Malaysia.
