Aws Y. Abed and Lobna Ali
Accounting Department, Tishk International University, Erbil, Iraq
Email: [email protected], [email protected]
DOI: 10.23918/ICABEP2019p35
(Full Paper)
Abstract
Influencing marketing is currently playing an important role in the marking effort of many companies and in many sectors, especially in the lifestyle sector. The emerging of social influencers (SI) in Instagram and Snapchat which are called models or fashionistas and have millions of followers eager to see their latest piece of content; attracted the business owners to try to get benefits of this large number of potential consumers. This study investigated such collaboration in the lifestyle sector by conducting a set of online, individual, semi-structured interviews with 10 young Iraqi women using Instagram. The main findings were the lack of online shopping culture thus the effect of SI is not as strong as in other countries, another key finding is the relationship between sponsorship and trust as the trust will go down when SIs sponsorship but in the same time the consumer is being affected by SI especially when it comes to the evaluation of alternatives and post-purchase decisions stages of the five-stage decision-making model.
Keywords: Social influencer, Influence marketing, fashion and beauty industry, lifestyle, decision making, purchase behaviour.
