Indirect determinants of online purchase decisions: A case study of different generations in Peru

The reckless pursuit of social, environmental, political and cultural issues and brands may alienate the very customer base, whom they try to impress, especially the millennials. Hence, this study intends to study the perceptions of millennials towards brand activism, so that the findings from the study can help the brand managers to steer their brands into the troubled waters of brand activism. The methodology followed is HTAB (Hypothesize, Test, Action, Business), a popular analysis framework given by Ken Black in his book titled “Business Statistics: Contemporary Decision Making (6th ed.)” A sample comprising of 286 respondents was collected. The final data had 286 observations and 45 features across seven categories.

It was found that millennials prefer to buy a brand if it supports a cause or purpose and they stop buying if brand behaves unethically. It was also observed that there is no gender difference amongst the millennials towards their perceptions concerning brand activism. Moreover, millennials across different income categories have similar perceptions of brand activism. It was also substantiated that the emotional tie of the millennials with the brand existing for a cause goes beyond price shifts and brands taking a political stance, cherry-picking of issues and being disruptive prompts and creates profound backlash for the brands.

Undoubtedly, in the modern age of digitalization, Millennials, who are considered digital natives, have become a massive target market for salespersons. Changes in the way Millennials think accompanied by an explosion of social media have led to an increased focus on social media influencer marketing in the company sector. To help establish a new marketing paradigm that accounts for these changes, this research aims to conceptualize and investigate the process of building consumer-brand relationships with Millennial consumers through social media micro-influencers. Findings based on structural equation modeling revealed that four core characteristics of social media micro-influencers (i.e., authenticity, the meaning of the influencer, specific content, and secret sharing) were a significant antecedent of brand engagement and brand love, which, in turn, mediated the pathway from social media micro-influencer characteristics to brand evangelism. Understanding what social media micro-influencers mean to Millennials offers the promise of improving brand evangelism through more precise market analysis and market strategy. In the discussion, the paper introduces a three-stage building method towards brand evangelism through social media micro-influencer, including: (1) the stage of selecting influencers; (2) the stage of constructing intense emotional responses to the brand (brand engagement and brand love); and ultimately (3) the stage of becoming a brand evangelist. Lastly, limitations and future directions were discussed.

Nowadays, social media influencers are one of the most important assets of many businesses that originate purchase decisions. The relevance of this paper is determined by the fact that it tries to fill in the research gap of literature determining the factors that might influence the purchase decisions of millennial consumers based on the theories of the constructs. The purpose is to determine the impact of brand value on the credibility of influencers over the purchase decision. Therefore, 412 millennial consumers from the city of Arequipa, Peru, were surveyed through an online form provided by Google. Then, the validation and descriptive statistics were made on the program SPSS. Additionally, the inferential statistics using the software Smart PLS. The results show a positive, significant, and direct relationship between the credibility of influencers and customers’ purchase decisions. Moreover, this relationship increases through the brand value when incorporated into the model as a mediator variable, facilitating the decision of consumers. In conclusion, it was estimated that consumers feel even more confident when social media influencers transmit the message showing specific brand attributes.

Acknowledgments
The authors thank the Universidad Nacional de San Agustin de Arequipa for its support in developing this project.
The present study has been self-financed by the authors.