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Top1. Introduction
Celebrity endorsement is an established marketing strategy employed to influence consumer affective and conative behaviour (Paul & Bhakar, 2018; Zhu, Amelina & Yen, 2020). In today’s digital era, the practice of employing social media influencers to generate favourable consumer action is growing due to its perceived ability to return higher profits for retailers (Weismuller et al., 2020; Cuevas et al., 2020; Mediakix, 2018). The increased usage of ad-blockers has added to the importance of this relatively less intrusive form of communication (Odell, 2015). However, the effectiveness of influencer marketing remains understudied (Lou & Yuan, 2018), and especially the comparative effectiveness of attractive celebrity influencers' vis-à-vis expert influencers remains a conundrum for retailers (Jin et al., 2018; Schouten et al., 2018).
Hence this study examines the effect of attractive celebrity influencers (ACI) vis-à-vis fashion expert influencers (EI) on online consumer-brand engagement (OCBE), which is further hypothesized to result in online impulse purchase (OIP). The moderating role of consumers’ impulse buying tendency (IBT) between OCBE and OIP is also examined. This study is particularly important because one school of thought claims that internet shopping has led to consumers’ making more planned purchases (Banjo & Germano, 2014; Aragoncillo & Orus, 2018), while the other claims that internet shopping leads to impulse purchases (Gupta, 2011; Rodríguez, 2013). Impulse purchases are of importance to retailers as it accounts for 40 percent to 80 percent of all sales, depending on the type of the product (Aragoncillo & Orus, 2018).
Extant research has posited that when consumers voluntarily interact with a brand on social media platforms, they tend to know more about the brand and eventually purchase it (Yoon et al., 2018; Schivinski et al., 2019). Hence, online consumer-brand engagement (OCBE) assumes greater importance for retailers, among other social media metrics. However, the knowledge of social media led drivers of OCBE remain understudied and need further investigation (Maslowska, Malthouse, & Collinger, 2016; Schivinski et al., 2019). Also, the relationship between OCBE and OIP has not been explored.
Consumers' impulse buying tendency (IBT) is a trait that explains their disposition to respond to stimuli and make impulse purchases (Beatty & Ferrell, 1998; Bandopadhyay, 2016). Consumers exposed to stimuli may end up purchasing out of impulse if their degree of IBT is high (Beatty & Ferrell, 1998). Hence, this study also factors in the moderating role of IBT between OCBE and OIP.