Consumer Trust Towards Content Marketing of Food & Beverage Businesses on Instagram: Empirical Analysis of Taiwanese and Singaporean Consumers

Abstract

Nowadays, food and beverage businesses need some adjustments regarding their marketing strategy as the lifestyle and dietary patterns of people are varied. A local restaurant is one of the businesses in the food and beverage industry that markets its product dominantly through social media. One of the marketing strategies on social media which local restaurant marketers can adopt is content marketing. However, content marketing will not work until trust is established (Newman, 2014). Marketers must ensure that the contents are genuine and transparent enough to develop trust (Kee & Yazdanifard, 2015). This study aims to examine the effect of product transparency on consumer trust to increase the effectiveness of content marketing, and to investigate whether one of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, uncertainty avoidance, can be the moderator of this relationship. The valid respondents of the online survey were 111 Taiwanese and Singaporean. It was revealed that product transparency has a positive influence on consumer trust and uncertainty avoidance cannot be the significant moderator of this relationship. Furthermore, an additional analysis provided an evidence where the uncertainty avoidance has a negative influence on consumer trust. Therefore, providing transparent information regarding food products in content marketing would help to increase the effectiveness of local restaurant’s marketing strategy through social media, and recognizing the cultural dimensions of where the business operates will give an initial hint of the consumer’s propensity to trust.