Abstract
AbstractThe power of social media influencers (SMIs) as effective endorsers for destinations and tourism products have been widely acknowledged. Despite being characterised as content generators by prior research, little has been done to examine how consumers perceive content produced by SMI, a key component of destination marketing campaigns. Moreover, parasocial relationship between SMI and the follower has been proven to enhance the persuasive impact of SMIs. Hence, this study aims to shed light on how consumers would assess the SMI and the content the SMI produced, as well as the effect of parasocial relationship on processing SMI destination marketing campaigns. Findings (N = 501) have highlighted that argument quality of SMI content has a stronger direct impact on campaign attitude, destination image and travel intention, as compared to source credibility. With the application of the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) as a framework, this study illuminates consumers’ interaction with the SMI destination marketing campaign and extends prior studies in understanding the importance of SMI content and parasocial relationship as a significant tool for future destination marketing.
Highlights
Social media provided users with a convenient and instantaneous platform to share their content in various forms – text, images and videos [1]
4.579 1.527 0.924 (3) I can rely on information I get from my favourite social media influencers (SMIs)
Findings have elucidated that the influences of Parasocial Relationship (PSR) between SMI and followers are two-fold
Summary
Social media provided users with a convenient and instantaneous platform to share their content in various forms – text, images and videos [1]. Studies have suggested the efficacy of SMI marketing in achieving various marketing outcomes such as enhancing brand awareness and purchase intention [2, 3]. This potential has been recognised by marketers and practitioners in the tourism industry, to leverage the power of SMIs for destinations and related products [4, 5]. Since existing studies have suggested that trust for the SMIs and their content informativeness have a positive impact on consumers’ travel decision journey [11, 12], and a positive effect on destination marketing [13], it is vital to investigate how parasocial relationship between the SMI and the follower would affect consumers’ processing (based on source credibility and argument quality) of the SMI destination marketing campaign
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