Instagram Influencers Impact on Customers' Intention on Purchasing Perfume

Abstract: Background: Celebrity endorsements is a marketing strategy that has been long used bymarketers to strengthen brands' reputations. Nowadays, due to the fast growth of socialmedia, number of people using social media increase day-by-day. Hence, the use of digitalplatforms as marketing channel has increasing. Plus, a changing shift from traditionalcelebrity endorsement to influencer marketing has also been observed whereby well-knownsocial media users are employed by brands to promote their products. Those people areknown as social media influencers (SMIs) and are deemed as non-traditional celebrities.According to advertising and marketing literature, celebrity endorsement is an effectiveapproach to improve attitudes towards brands and raise buying intentions. However, thereare limited research on the impacts of different types of celebrities on social media uponcustomers, especially in the perfume industry. Therefore, this study was created to fill this gap. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to explore the effect of Instagram influencers onVietnamese customer’s attitude and intentions in purchasing perfume. This paper adoptedthe Ohanian model of source credibility since the authors aim to examine associationbetween SMIs’ perceived attractiveness, trustworthiness, and expertise and customerattitude. The relationship between customer attitude and purchasing intention of perfumewas then also investigated. Method: The survey method was used as the research method. Online questionnaire wasemployed to gather primary data from the respondents in Vietnam. A total of 147 sampleVietnamese Instagram users participated in the survey and collected data was analysed usingthe SPSS 28.0 version. Conclusion: The research results showed that all three dimension of source credibilitymodel, attractiveness, trustworthiness, and expertise, had significant influences on customerattitude. Findings also demonstrated a positive relationship between customer attitudetowards SMIs and their buying intention of perfumes. This study made several contributionsto both theory and practice, which were also highlighted in this paper.