Millennials' responses towards social media claims

: the example of recyclability as the unique advertised feature

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to scrutinize the differences in consumers’ answers, namely purchase intention (PI) and willingness to pay (WTP), to a specific customer segment, namely the millennials. An additional emphasis would be placed on the effect that frequency exposure (FE) on social media could play on both purchase intention (PI) and willingness to pay (WTP). A quantitative experimental design was applied within an online questionnaire to assess the research hypotheses on a non-probability sample of the pre-defined consumers, using the category of clothes and accessories, and specifically t-shirts. Data was inspected using separate samples t-tests. To evaluate the moderation hypothesis, the SPSS PROCESS macro was also rolled out. The experimentation demonstrated that purchase intentions were unquestionably higher for millennials exposed to the feature, whilst willingness to pay persisted as being analogous between the two groups. Outstandingly, the moderating effect of frequency exposure couldn’t prove being conclusive, and therefore couldn’t contextualize the effect of the type of claim visualized on millennials’ answers. This study nonetheless contributes to the research on consumer behavior towards social media claim, illustrating that differentiated targeted claims are perceived as affecting similarly the final consumer response, all the more as frequency exposure does not alike explain the mentioned causal relationship. Still, this should help managers and marketers to build upon a more elicited message that magnifies purchase intention between two randomly assigned groups from a same sample of study.

Date of Award	6 Jul 2021
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Marta Bicho (Supervisor)