Determining the impact of brand value on the credibility of influencers over the purchase decision of millennial consumers

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.

The article aims to investigate the role and features of the content and test proposed indicators for evaluating its effectiveness within the marketing enterprise communications with the client using Internet technologies. The differences between traditional content communications and content communications using unifying content have been presented. Based on review of scientific works and statistic data and results of the studies, a system of indicators for evaluating the level of content supply cost-effectiveness is proposed: average cost of attracting one user of website, coefficient of lead generation of the Internet website, average cost of attracting one lead, content effectiveness ratio, average purchase in consequence of content supply, profit from the sale of goods in consequence of content supply, profitability of using the Internet marketing tools. This system of indicators allows monitoring of content effectiveness at key stages of enterprise-customer interaction. The proposed indicators of content effectiveness were tested on two leading enterprises in the field of water purification and water supply in Ukraine: “ZIKO Company” and “BWT Ukraine”. It was concluded that only a high quality of content supply could provide an enterprise with a high level of customer conversion and significant visibility of its website in different search engines.