- Title
- Examining customer motivations to participate in social commerce: conceptualisation, impact and heterogeneity
- Creator
- Azad Moghddam, Hamed
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2022
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- Over the past decade, Social Commerce (SC) has arisen as a global phenomenon that enabled significant commercial opportunities for consumer brands with customers, which have been heralded as the future of online shopping. Owing to the commercial opportunities provided by the recent technological advancements within SC platforms (SCPs) such as Instagram, Facebook, WeChat and TikTok, consumer brands have since made a heavy investment to facilitate consumption experiences to increase sales, strengthen customer-brand relationships, and offer differentiated brand positions. In recent years, literature on understanding customer motivation, attitude and behaviour across social media platforms has quickly accumulated in the marketing and information systems fields. For instance, the focus has identified various intrinsic and extrinsic motives that influence a series of online customer behaviours across a variety of social media brand community (SMBC) platforms. Despite this work, more theoretical and empirical elaboration is required within the specific SC consumption setting, which emphasises commerce exchanges and comprehensively understands what motivates consumers to participate on SC brand pages in such transaction-oriented situations, that in turn, results in achieving performance outcomes for the brand. To address these aims, this thesis advances four research questions and developed a comprehensive theoretical framework by adopting a two-staged unequally weighted mixed-method sequential research design that combines qualitative (Study One Netnography) and quantitative (Study Two Online Survey) techniques. In study one, an exploratory netnography approach was used to identify the consumers' motives that were present on 10 SC brand pages on the social commerce platform (SCP) such as Instagram to inform the development of a theoretical framework. In Study 2, the theoretical framework and associated hypotheses were empirically tested via an online survey (i.e., Qualtrics) with a total of 574 U.S. consumers of SC brand pages on the SCP of Instagram. The study findings offer several contributions to marketing theory which demonstrated that conceptualising and measuring customer motivation to participate in SC through the combination of five motivation dimensions, namely, advice seeking, escapism, remuneration, social presence and shopping planning, is a valid approach to apply in a SC consumption setting. The findings provide clarity and detail to then provide a theoretical foundation for understanding customer motives to participate in SC and its influence on customer perceptions, attitudes, and behaviour in the SC consumption context. This study also identified individual customer characteristics of optimum stimulation level and perceived social risk as key contingency variables that have differential condition-specific relationships in the proposed theoretical framework. Managerially, the study insights inform SC practitioners on allocating marketing resources to SC strategy and those associated content marketing activities that serve the content needs of customers across each of the five motivation dimensions, which then translates to favourable brand performance outcomes. Further, the insights inform SC practitioners of relevant value propositions that can be communicated by the brand via social media marketing activities, and more broadly, offline brand communications that may attract consumers to realise various needs and sought-after benefits via the brand’s SCP. Finally, the insights inform SC practitioners of contingency variables that attenuate or amplify the proposed system of relationships that are useful for segmentation purposes and the development of branded communications to better appeal to consumers based on their optimum stimulation level and perceived social risk. Finally, the limitations of the study and future research directions are discussed in terms of how they can serve as a point of departure for further studies in the domains of branding and consumer behaviour in the context of SC.
- Subject
- customer motivations; social commerce; COBRAs; Instagram; netnography; PLS-SEM
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1505427
- Identifier
- uon:55668
- Rights
- Copyright 2022 Hamed Azad Moghddam
- Language
- eng
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Thesis | 7 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 254 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |