Abstract
The advertising industry has been moving toward digital advertising with the help of internet penetration across the world. Importantly, consumers today are exposed to digital advertising with social media advertising becoming one of the most vital channels to get in touch with the consumers. However, consumer trust in social media is reported to be low although trust is not a static concept but changes over time. Hence, this research aimed to study the relationship between social media advertising and consumer perceived trustworthiness among social media users in Malaysia. Consumers’ perceived trustworthiness is examined through five dimensions of social media advertising namely personalization, electronic word-of-mouth, interactivity, informativeness, and trendiness. The research employed a quantitative research method and resulted in 415 valid respondents. The statistical results indicated that all dimensions of social media advertising have a significant relationship with consumer perceived trustworthiness. In particular, informativeness, personalization, and electronic word-of-mouth were found to have a stronger association with consumer perceived trustworthiness. These findings added to the existing marketing literature and provided valuable insights for marketers on the ways to enhance consumer perceived trustworthiness through various dimensions of social media advertising. Practically, this study will help the food and beverage industry to understand dominant factors that create consumer trustworthiness while designing their social media marketing interventions to maximize the effect of advertising to survive in a fast-changing and competitive business environment.
Highlights
The interest in food has been on an increasing trend among consumers
Despite multiple challenges in the industry, restoration of consumer trustworthiness lies in the ability of the food and beverage industry to identify areas of concern so that they are surmountable by embracing the changes through careful and proactive planning and execution of social media marketing
This finding is in line with the previous study where Duffett (2015) reported that higher time spent on social media would result in more favorable behavioral attitudes towards social media advertising. These findings have strengthened premises advocated by Credibility Theory attractiveness would increase trustworthiness (Phung & Qin, 2018). This was affirmed by Lafferty and Goldsmith (1999) who discovered that credibility is an important factor that influences the genesis of attitude and behavior towards advertising which supports the relationship between Social Media Advertising and Consumer Perceived Trustworthiness
Summary
The interest in food has been on an increasing trend among consumers. This positive signal for food demand has encouraged the food and beverage organizations to embrace social media to reach out to the consumers through various communication tools including audio and visuals. Making social media marketing an integral part of business strategy produces many benefits (Shareef et al, 2019; Shiau et al, 2017) apart from allowing an organization to achieve its marketing objectives (Ajina, 2019) by adapting to the changing behaviors of the consumers(Stephen & Lehmann, 2016) It is the main intention of food and beverage organizations to connect with the customers and to build an ultimate food experience. Despite multiple challenges in the industry, restoration of consumer trustworthiness lies in the ability of the food and beverage industry to identify areas of concern so that they are surmountable by embracing the changes through careful and proactive planning and execution of social media marketing. It is a timely addition to the marketing literature as the consumers are maturing and social media advertising taking a center stage in the business strategy formulation of the organizations
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More From: International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences
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