| Summary: | Abstract
As social media continues to advance, consumers increasingly rely on social media
to access information about beauty products, which has led to a proliferation of
beauty influencers. Beauty influencers have become an important source of
information on beauty products for many consumers by posting information and
tips about beauty products on social media platforms to showcase their expertise.
The content shared by beauty influencers on social media platforms is also
subliminally influencing consumers' attitudes, perceptions and behaviours. The
impact of social media influencers as a marketing communication tool has been
extensively studied. Different scholars often use expertise as an important feature
of source credibility models to measure the credibility of celebrities and social
media influencers. However, most scholarship on this expertise feature has been
measured on a single dimension. However, the degree of expertise of influencers in
specialist domains should be measured more comprehensively. Therefore, this
study draws on research from other fields to categorise expertise into two
dimensions, domain depth and domain breadth, for research. This dissertation
chooses to examine the expertise of beauty influencers and explore their influence
on consumers' intention to purchase beauty brands along two new dimensions,
domain depth and domain breadth, respectively. In addition, this study will
investigate whether influencer type has a moderating role in the relationship
between beauty influencers' expertise (domain depth and domain breadth) and
consumers' intention to purchase beauty brands.
This study focuses on Chinese consumers who are aware of or have followed any
influencers on Chinese social media platforms and uses a quantitative research
methodology to collect a total of 184 online questionnaires to explore the impact of
beauty influencers' expertise on Chinese consumers' intention to purchase beauty
brands. In addition, the study used established scales from existing research to
measure the dimensions of expertise and purchase intention and used SPSS
software to process the questionnaire data to test the research model and
hypotheses presented in this study. The results of this study show that the domain
depth of beauty influencers has a significant effect on Chinese consumers' intention
to purchase beauty brands; the domain breadth of beauty influencers does not
have a significant effect on Chinese consumers' intention to purchase beauty
brands; the type of influencer does not moderate the relationship between the
domain depth of beauty influencers and Chinese consumers' intention to purchase
beauty brands, but the type of influencer does not moderate the relationship
between the domain breadth of beauty influencers and Chinese consumers'
intention to purchase beauty brands. Still, the type of influencer does not moderate
the relationship between the domain breadth of beauty influencers. However,
influencer type has a moderating effect on the relationship between the domain
breadth of beauty influencers and Chinese consumers' intention to purchase beauty
brands.
Marketers of beauty and fashion brands can use the results to select more
appropriate social media influencers for their marketing campaigns. This
dissertation also concludes with some suggestions for future research.
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