Social media advertising and consumer decision-making: the mediating role of consumer engagement

Abstract

This paper investigated the effectiveness of social media advertising on consumer decision-making and the mediating role of consumer engagement. Three constructs including emotional appeal, informativeness and advertising creativity were employed to assess the effectiveness of firms' social media advertising on customer decision-making. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses with structural equation modelling were employed to evaluate a proposed model on the relationships among the dependent and independent constructs. Tabachnick and Fidell (2007) formula was used to sample 310 active social media users. Only active followers of fashion brands were considered for this study. The study showed that consumer engagements influenced the relationship between informativeness (full mediation) and advertising creativity (partial mediation) in social media advertising and consumer decision-making. The study recommends that firms that advertise fashions brands on social media must focus on crafting advertisements that are creative and informative in order to influence decisions that consumers make on social media platforms. The study contributes to practice by indicating that emotional appeals of social media adverts no longer influence consumers decision-making on fashion brands, but rather the extent of information and newness of the adverts to satisfy their needs played a major role in consumers' decision-making.