Abstract:
Kenyan beauty influencers on Instagram are part of a growing global preference in marketing to leverage social media engagement opportunities based on para-social relationships with their fans. This study had three objectives; (a) to investigate how an influencer’s perceived expertise in beauty, helps to shape their Instagram follower’s purchase intentions of beauty products. (b) How an influencer’s perceived trustworthiness by their Instagram followers’ affects purchase intentions of beauty products. (c) To determine how an influencer’s level of perceived attractiveness to their Instagram followers links to their purchase intentions of beauty products in Kenya. This study used a quantitative research methodology. A survey instrument with a Cronbach Alpha of .794 was distributed to n=400 Instagram followers of influencers in Nov 2021. Findings of Correlation analysis on SPSS version 24, revealed that there was a weak positive correlation between Attractiveness and Purchase Intention at r =.136**, meaning that the attractiveness of an influencer does not lead to the audience’s intention to purchase. Further, there was a weak positive correlation between Trustworthiness and Purchase Intention at .198**, meaning that audiences consider the trustworthiness of the influencer to a small extent. However, there was a very strong positive correlation between perceived Expertise and Purchase Intention at r=.709**. Thus, the study recommends that influencers should concentrate more on perfecting their skills and knowledge of products they endorse to influence purchase intention by their followers and maximize brand impact among their followers. Further studies need to be more qualitative to analyze the audience interaction with the influencer’s content in determining purchase intention about different demographic as well as on different social media platforms such as Meta, Twitter of Pinterest.
