“AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE POTENTIAL INFLUENCE OF FASHION AND BEAUTY BLOGGERS, ON THE PURCHASE INTENTIONS OF UK WOMEN”
Complete Research
Authors:
Abstract
RESEARCH BACKGROUND: Blogs were primarily used as a new means of communication but as they have grown, this new medium has been adopted by firms to better communicate with their customers at a personal level.
The UK fashion and beauty industry positively contributes to the UK. In addition,this industry heavily uses fashion and beauty bloggers as part of their marketing strategy. So that they can build brand awareness, learn about their customers’ needs and gain competitive advantage.
PURPOSE: The purpose of the research was to investigate if bloggers influence young UK women, between 18-34 years old, to purchase fashion and beauty items.
METHODOLOGY: The researcher used quantitative research method in the form of online questionnaires. These were posted on fashion and beauty forums, as well as Twitter and Facebook. 150 responses were collected using purposive and snowball sampling. Limitations included the sampling technique, small sample size, and lack of external validity.
FINDINGS: Perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness and blogger reputation influenced young UK women to purchase fashion and beauty items from the high street.6 out of 7 hypotheses were accepted with the correlation coefficients providing a weak to moderate strength. In addition, these hypothesis were statistically significant as they were <0.01 significant level. However, the relationship between PEOU and attitude was strong, but was not statistically significant.
Keywords: Social Media Marketing, Bloggers, Fashion, Beauty.
- Introduction
- Background Rationale
Blogging has become a great way to communicate with the customers in order to understand the needs and requirements of customers. Blogs are efficiently utilised by the fashion and beauty industry in order to connect with and understand the customers in order to meet their expectations. Blogs are online diaries where the writer posts about a particular topic. Interactivity and feedback is generated by comments on posts (Chaffey and Chadwick, 2012).
- Research Problem
The aim of this paper is to find out till what extent the women of UK are influenced by the blogs of fashion and beauty firms, as additionally, fashion and beauty brands target women (Mintel, 2011). It is to investigate how blogging can act as an efficient marketing strategy, especially for the fashion and beauty industry of UK.
(I.C. Conf. Paper)