The relationship between the perceived credibility of beauty blogging and consumers' attitude and purchase intentions

Abstract

This study explores how source attractiveness, source credibility, and a blog post affect the consumers' attitude towards a particular cosmetics brand and their purchase intentions. It also aims to find out if using beauty bloggers to endorse a cosmetics brand can indeed be effective. The theoretical framework of the study revolves around the Two-Step Flow Theory of Mass Communication, which shows the movement of the meaning of messages from mass media to the receivers of the message, who then become opinion leaders in the process as they pass on their own opinions and ideas about the message to other people. The theory posits that this personal influence from the opinion leaders affects people's knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors about and towards the message. The study further uses two models, the Source Credibility Model and the Source Attractiveness Model, which collectively identify three dimensions of the overall perceived credibility: trustworthiness, expertise, and attractiveness. The conceptual framework is an integration of the aforementioned theory and models, but is tailor-fitted to the study. The research mostly focuses on the second stage in the TwoStep Flow Theory, where the opinion leader's personal influence presumably affects the behavior of the receiver of the message. This personal influence is gauged by first measuring the perceived credibility of the blogger using the three aforementioned dimensions of credibility. The intervening variable that is used is the blog post written by beauty blogger Nikki Tiu about Maybelline's Lip Polish by ColorSensational. Data is collected from 100 female respondents using a reliable survey questionnaire, which contains 28 5-point Likert scale items grouped into six: trustworthiness, expertise, attractiveness, blog post, consumers' attitude towards the brand, and purchase intentions. The means and standard deviations of each group of items are computed to scale the responses, then each of the results of the first four variables are tested of its correlation with each of the results of the last two variables using Spearman's rho in SPSS. Findings show that while all of the first four variables are significantly and positively related to the last two variables, a strong positive relationship only exists between the blog post and both the attitude and the intent to purchase. Overall, the perceived credibility of the blogger is only moderately related to both the attitude and intent to purchase. Hence, effectiveness is found in beauty blog endorsements only when the blog post is well-liked and positively received by the readers.