Social Media Marketing via Influencers in the Beauty Industry: The impact on Vietnamese customers’ decision journey

Absztrakt (kivonat)

Due to the rapid development of social media over the past few decades, the way people communicate and interact with each other has changed significantly. In Vietnam, the total number of active social media users by 2021 is 72 million (We are Social & Hootsuite, 2021). Along with the constant interest in the beauty market of Vietnamese customers, many brands have adapted different social media marketing tools to strengthen the interaction and relationship with their audiences. However, one of the most prominent methods is marketing through beauty influencers. Accordingly, the primary purpose of the thesis is to develop an understanding of the impact influencers made on Vietnamese consumers' decision journey. In order to gain better insights, the theoretical framework of the research was based on the communication model of Two Step Flow Theory by Lazarfelds and Katz (Katz, 1995) and the marketing model of The Circle of Customers Journeys (Court et al., 2009). Vietnamese social media users were the target audience for the study. Quantitative research was used to obtain general viewpoints of the Vietnamese consumers through an online questionnaire survey in Google Forms. The study gathered altogether 278 respondents, of which the majority was covered by Vietnamese female participants aged 18 to 24. The findings revealed that Vietnamese beauty influencers do have a partial impact on the customers’ decision making journey. Even though many people are unaffected or have a neutral response to the influencers, the data collected still show a positive trend. According to the research results, beauty influencers can help brands become more memorable in the early stages of a customers' purchase journey, as well as significantly increase consumer interest in the promoted brands. Among different types of influencers, Nano-Influencers are recorded to gain the highest impact during purchase decision making process of Vietnamese customers. In conclusion, it is suggested that influencer marketing can be used as a reference to Vietnamese beauty products and services in order to generate more remarkable influence on the endorsed brands. The research, however, was not distributed evenly across different regions and education levels in Vietnam. Therefore, a future study should delve deeper into these variations.