The Role of the Gratifications of Nutrition Instagrammers’ Generated Content in Developing Actual Buying Behavior for Functional Foods in Egypt

Abstract

The change in people’s perception of the role of nutrition in health improvement has evolved a new concept of food with disease prevention characteristics called Functional Foods (FFs). This study examines the role of entertainment, informativeness, and socializing gratifications of Nutrition Instagramers’ generated content in influencing consumers’ purchasing intention and actual buying behavior of functional foods. It also aims to investigate the effect of these gratifications on the attitude toward Nutrition Instagramers (NIs) and if such attitude would affect the attitude toward FFs and consumers’ buying intention. Also, it aims to investigate the association between buying intention and actual buying behavior of FFs and the gender-moderating role of this relationship. A quantitative research method was applied using a survey strategy, and the data were collected from 456 Egyptians who followed Nineteen NIs and analyzed through Structural Equation Model (SEM) using AMOS 25 software. The findings revealed that entertainment, socializing, and informativeness gratifications positively impact consumers’ purchase intention and attitude toward FFs through the consumers’ attitudes toward NIs, and the more informativeness of NIs’ generated content, the more likely to influence consumers’ purchasing intention directly. Also, our results indicated that attitudes toward NIs and FFs significantly impact consumers’ purchase intention. Furthermore, our results revealed that gender strengthens the association between consumers’ purchase intention and actual buying behavior in favor of males. Finally, this study bridges a gap about factors that impact attitudes toward NIs, FFs, consumer purchase intention, and consumer actual buying behavior of FFs with a unique application of the Uses and Gratifications Theory (UGT) in influencer marketing.