The effects of social media opinion leaders' recommendations on followers' intention to buy.
| Autor | Nunes, Renata Huhn |
I Introduction
The rapid expansion of the internet's popularity has made this environment attractive to people and businesses. The network is intended not only to be a form of entertainment, but also a platform for consumers to exchange experiences and preferences referring to consumer brands (Araujo & Neijens, 2012). Reviews by internet users are a type of electronic word-of-mouth, and are important sources of information in the decision-making process of other consumers (Wei & Lu, 2013). This occurs because the psychological processes of individuals are subject to social influences (Deutsch & Gerard, 1955).
Due to their limited capacity of mental processing, people need to find ways to simplify their decision-making (Merwe & Heerden, 2009). Recommendations help consumers to reduce the amount of information to be processed and to filter the large amount of products/services available in virtual shopping environments, guiding them to a smaller set of alternatives that meet their specific needs (Kumar & Benbasat, 2006). Thus, online consumers are people who are active in their quest for information, looking for texts referring to their interests, interpreting and making judgments about the messages received, in order to understand their content and adapt them to their own problems and situations (Rieh, 2002).
One of the main sources of electronic word-of-mouth are opinion leaders (Shi & Wojnicki, 2014). Opinion leaders are individuals who can influence thoughts, attitudes or the behavior of other people, leading them to act in a certain way at a certain frequency (Rogers, 1983). Consumers routinely adopt strategies to reduce their decision-making risks (Leal, Hor-Meyll, & Pessoa, 2014) and the opinion leaders act as agents for risk reduction, through experimentation and evaluation (Cho, Hwang, & Lee, 2012).
In this context, this study is based on the relationship between online opinion leaders and their followers, who receive several evaluations and need to decide if they will accept or discard them in their decision-making processes. Thus, the main objective of this study is to propose a conceptual model to assess if persuasive messages can lead to acceptance by the consumers of information given by social media opinion leaders, and, also, to what extent the messages on products and services affect consumer behavior regarding the consumption of the recommended products or services and their intention to buy them.
The acceptance of information is a topic widely studied and discussed in academia (Cheung, Lee, & Rabjohn, 2008; Cheung, Luo, Sia, & Chen, 2009; Cheung & Thadani, 2012; Sussman & Siegal, 2003; Teng, Khong, Goh, & Chong, 2014a). However, there are few studies referring to the determinants and potential of the messages on consumption on online social networks (Teng et al., 2014a). This paper, therefore, seeks to contribute to the literature expanding the studies on the impact of word-of-mouth messages on the acceptance of information (Teng et al., 2014a) to specifically assess opinion leadership in online social media. Moreover, this study extends the research on the influence of the attributes of information on the adoption of information for consumption purposes, by adding their impact to the purchase intention of social media users who read this information and to the attitude of potential consumers.
2 Literature review
2.1 Opinion leadership, behavior and social media
The concept of opinion leadership refers to an individual's ability to influence in a social network. Opinion leaders are the most influential group in social systems (Rogers, 1983). When potential consumers are not yet familiar with a product/service, they associate a high degree of uncertainty and risk to its purchase. Therefore, the adoption of this product/service depends on an individual's predisposition to test new features and form his or her own perception on the product (Ortega, 2011). Compared with people who seek information, the opinion leaders generally have more experience and more information on the product/service category, have greater involvement with it, and display a more exploratory and innovative behavior (Lyons & Henderson, 2005). Thus, we can see the importance of opinion leaders, whose main features are innovative behavior, the knowledge of a given category of products/services, and their power to influence others (Eck, Jager & Leeflang, 2011).
In the digital era, in which one can use the internet as a source of consultation for both news and reviews, the discussion on the influence of certain groups in the dissemination of information should be expanded to the online environment (Merwe & Heerden, 2009). Digital opinion leaders are those who use online spaces, such as blogs, forums, social networks and other forms of online social media actively and in a collaborative manner (San Jose-Cabezudo, Camarero-Izquierdo & Rodriguez-Pinto, 2012). They can influence people in three main ways: serving as a model to be copied, through word-of-mouth advertising, or by giving advice on purchase and use (Merwe & Heerden, 2009). Digital opinion leaders attract a lot of attention from internet users and play a key role in word-of-mouth advertising, generating messages and content of use to other people (Meng, Wei & Zhu, 2011), influencing people's attitudes.
An attitude is an assessment, through a continuum, with positive and negative characteristics acting as anchors, that an individual makes through an association of knowledge, meanings and beliefs (Peter & Olson, 2009). This assessment allows for the examination of the personal relevance of a certain concept and whether one has a favorable or unfavorable position towards it (Cheung & Thadani, 2012). For example, a consumer's attitude concerning whether he/she has gathered enough information varies from strongly positive to strongly negative (Nolder & Kadous, 2017). So, attitudes may differ in direction (positive vs. negative) and/or strength (strong vs. weak). The power of such attitude determines the extent to which it influences the behavior (Petty, Haugtved, & Smith, 1995). Thus, attitudes are a precursor of judgments and decisions (Petty et al., 1995).
This can be followed by an action by the individual, or not (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1977). Attitudes already formed by individuals may, however, act as mediators of behavior, influencing their purchase intention (Cheung & Thadani, 2012; Rocha, Ferreira, & Silva, 2013). Attitudes are always referring to a specific concept, whether physical or social objects, policies or other people (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1977) and are not necessarily intense or extreme, and may be negative, neutral or positive.
The emergence of online social media encompasses texts, images, videos and social networks (Berthon, Pitt, Plangger, & Shapiro, 2012) and has amplified the ability to share and spread the content generated by users. By exchanging messages, digital social media users can interact and exchange information through various channels such as blogs, social networks, forums, virtual communities, sharing platforms and virtual worlds, among many others (Teng et al., 2014a).
Within this scenario, Instagram is one of the digital social media platforms that is being most used by opinion leaders to express their opinions on products and services. Instagram was created so that users could share photos, and presently also allows for short videos (Silva, Melo, Almeida, Salles, & Loureiro, 2013). Users interact through comments on published photos or through "likes."
2.2 Acceptance of information theory
The theory of limited rationality indicates that when a person is making a choice, that person does not have access to all the information available on that subject and, even if they did, they would not have the ability to process and evaluate it all (Merwe & Heerden, 2009). A way to facilitate their decision-making is through recommendations from other users that give useful information on the products (Kumar & Benbasat, 2006).
Deutsch and Gerard (1955) proposed the Dual-Process theory (DPT) model to evaluate social influences on individuals' judgments. According to this model, two types of influence can affect a person's decisions: normative and informational influences. Normative influences are those that seek to make an individual act in accordance with the expectations of others. Informational influences, in their turn, are those referring to the acceptance of information passed on by others as evidence of reality. DPT suggests that the first motivator of attitudinal changes and, consequently, behavior, is external information (Bhattacherjee & Sanford, 2006). New information introduces other possibilities, causing one to think about different alternatives and possibly change the attitude towards a certain subject.
Another recognized model on the adoption of information is the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), proposed by Petty and Cacioppo (1984). According to the ELM, the informational influence can occur in any part of the user's decision-making process (Cacioppo, Petty, Kao & Rodriguez, 1986; Sussman & Siegal, 2003). For Petty and Cacioppo (1984), an individual is never totally profound or totally careless in his or her assessment of messages. Depending on the situations presented, each person will show different levels of depth in processing incoming messages. These different levels are presented in a continuous space, which goes from a central route to the peripheral route.
By following the central route, an individual interprets and assesses the arguments contained in an informational message and uses cognitive elaborations to assume a rational positioning on their validity (Wu & Shaffer, 1987). If arguments are considered to be of quality, people tend to consider the information useful (Bhattacherjee & Sanford, 2006). A user may often use his/ her perceptions on the source of information (heuristic evaluation) to assist in the...
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