Influence of Facebook Advertising on Intention-to-Purchase Amongst Millennials in Bangladesh

Abstract

The advent of the Facebook advertisement has brought a novel standpoint to local-fashion products, event management, and photography services brand pages by enabling consumers’ purchase intentions. However, through Facebook brand pages, millennial consumers can fulfill their purchasing activities about products and services that are rarely established as physical stores. The emergence of Facebook advertisement permits marketers or page owners to monitor and comprehend the target consumers’ behavior who are engaging with these pages, which iscreating huge potential for the local-fashion products, event management, and photography services page owners. Thus, this research aims to examine the influence of Facebook advertising impacting purchase intentions amongst millennial consumers’, after grasping the importance of these three sectors’ Facebook brand pages in Bangladesh. To accomplish this, the research in this thesis firstly focused on Facebook advertisement to explore if Facebook advertising has any influence on millennial consumers’ purchase intention or not and secondly, on the consumer’s online engagement behavior impacted by the influential determinants. For revealing this issue, four antecedents have been addressed to propose a conceptual model based on six theories and models, namely, Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA), Consumer Engagement Theory, Para-social Interaction Theory, Source credibility Model, Advertising Value Model and Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). The antecedents are examined as the determinants of millennial consumers’ intention to purchase on Facebook advertising. The proposed model is validated through co-variance-based structural equation modeling (CB-SEM) surveyed 386 Facebookusers who are following Facebook brand pages of fashion products, event management, and photography services in Bangladesh. The results have revealed that the perceived usefulness of Facebook advertising, social media influencer marketing, and entertainment value of Facebook advertising is the key factors for indirectly impacting millennial consumers’ purchase intention through consumer engagement, which is a mediating variable in this research. However, the results have revealed that consumer online engagement as a mediating variable is not strongly impacting positively purchase intention. The partial effect of mediating variable is signifying that in the selected domains of Facebook ads, the characteristics are more persuading rather than the number of likes, comments, and shares. Except for the entertainment value of Facebook advertising, millennials’ purchase intention is strongly affected by the perceived usefulness of Facebook advertising and social media influencer marketing resulting from the direct relationship. Besides, vii to corroborate the quantitative results of the influence of Facebook advertising impacting millennials' purchase intention, two open-ended questions are included in the research, which is analyzed quantitatively through thematic content analysis, which uncovered 14 subthemes similar to the results of structural equation modeling (SEM). This research has contributed to the theoretical consequences through its authenticated model and explored key antecedents of Facebook advertising of Facebook brand pages in fashion products, event management, and photography services. Specifically, this research has developed a comprehensive model through the integration of separate four models and two theories by approaching a systematic literature review. Moreover, the results have contributed to social media advertising-related literature by identifying influential determinants of purchase intention by extending TRA, TAM, Advertising value model, Para-social interaction theory, Source credibility model, and consumer engagement theory. This offers new insights to future researchers who study millennial consumers’ behavior influenced by Facebook advertising. Indeed, results corroborated in this study support that integration should be prolonged to future studies examining varied sectors by understanding the changing aspects of Facebook ads. Highlighting consumer behavior from a more inclusive standpoint sourced from brand pages, Facebook ads should be managed. The subthemes generated from the thematic content analysis can be either tested as the elements of new theories and models or as insertion of existing literature. For the researchers who are studying the determinants and influence of Facebook ads, and the researchers investigating consumers’ intention to purchase within a different research setting, the study provides deep insights. Moreover, this study further extends the generational cohort theory specifying ‘Millennials’ intention to purchase through Facebook advertising in Bangladesh. Regarding practicality, this research delivers a complete view and generates a foundation for the representation and design of the advertising posts on Facebook brand pages (FBPs) for marketers in the local-fashion products, event management, and photography services targeting millennial consumers. Specifically, young entrepreneurs, self- made local influencers or micro-influencers, dynamic marketers of home-originated fashion products, and Facebook-based service owners of photography and event management businesses can be advantageous in their strategy formulation.