Impact of influencer marketing versus traditional celebrity marketing on consumer purchasing behavior

Abstract

Social media has become one of the trusted sources for product reviews and it helps brand to increase their visibility. Social media is used in marketing to a great extent. It has become essential marketing tool to determine customer needs. Branding of a company’s product is very essential to stay competitive in the market. Brands are taking advantage of social media and digital marketing tools to increase brand awareness of their products among customers. Advertisement is key to market the product and companies choose celebrities to endorse their product to reach large mass of targeted population. However, celebrity endorsement of a product is an expensive strategy. With the increase in internet usage, social media is reaching to every corner of city. There is also rise in micro influencers who have good number of followers. They focus on niche area and can influence customers purchasing decisions with their reviews, analysis, and endorsement. Thus, many firms are now inclining towards influencer marketing. Our objective in this project is to understand the impact of both traditional celebrity marketing and influencer marketing on the purchasing behavior of customer. We targeted two different set of customers of almost same age and category with two sets of questionnaires, one based on celebrity marketing and another set on influencer marketing. Our goal is to capture the purchase intention of customers by showing two advertisements endorsed by celebrity and micro influencer each. We started our project with a perception that celebrity might have higher impact on customers purchasing behavior than influencer. We performed Anova on two sample sets of data to measure the difference between the marketing strategies. We have also studied about other parameters which can impact customer purchasing behavior after seeing the advertisement by endorser. We understood that there is not any big difference in the impact created by celebrity marketing and influencer marketing. Customer are unbiased towards endorsement by celebrity and micro influencer. They look at the authenticity of the endorser and his relevance to the product. Our analysis recommends that companies should equally prioritize influencer marketing for their marketing strategy as traditional marketing to target the customers. Since the reach of a single micro influencer not so high, greater number of micro influencers should be roped in to expand the reach and create the same impact as a traditional endorsement by incurring relatively low budget. Companies can also encourage and help influencers to increase the number of followers.