The Effects of fashion advertising messages via Facebook on Users Psychological Responses

Abstract

Since technology has developed, and especially smart phone with utilizing internet is the most influential part on major social media platform to become an important communication tool. This mechanism brought social media to become an important source to communicate. Marketing communication using social media has already been evaluated as business tools for luxury fashion brands to create the familiar emotions with reducing misunderstanding and prejudice toward luxury brands (Kim, Ko, 2011). Previous research demonstrated that psychological constructs explain a large part of consumers consumption. For understanding the humans mentality connected to purchase intention, it is important to identify their psychological states and how these states can lead to get the desire of possess. This research sets the goal to find the significant psychological factors that could create the social effects and how these social effects mesmerize the consumers to buy the product.

From a literature review, this study is focused on Leibensteins theory (1950), which are about three conspicuous consumption effects: Bandwagon, Snob, and Veblen effects. According to Leibensteins work (1950), Bandwagon, Snob, and Veblen effects are the social tendencies to understand the consumers demand. His study suggested three social effects to understand the consumers demand and how their consumption changed with variable situations. The previous researches are identified that conspicuous consumption is predominantly psychological in its motivation and expression there is a need for a separate construct focusing on the psychological elements. However, it was found that there are lack of research studies to apply the relationship between social phenomena and psychological motivations to understand the general consumption. Therefore, this study is the proposal experiment to see how different types of psychological emotions relate to social effects and stimulate to purchase intention.

This study is using diary method to investigate the users response. The diary method is a primary method for collecting the qualitative research. The diary method is a method that asks respondents to express their immediate reactions. This research is going to focus on the effectiveness of psychological emotions and consumers react on different marketing messages. Based on the previous research, Facebook is assigned to be used representative social media network, and different types of eight marketing messages are organized to be experiment. Each marketing messages contain different types of psychological emotions related to social effects.

As a result, this research study is embracing Leibensteins theory (1950) to examine the psychological emotions and his theoretical social effects influence consumers to get purchase intention. Consumers continuously do self-monitoring and self-improvement. Psychological emotions are important source to stimulate purchasing behavior but it needs to be careful to expose proper limit. This study is the basic step to study the interaction between human emotions and social phenomena and further more how it relates to purchasing behavior. We hope this study is helpful to create effective advertisement with applying psychological factors wisely.

Keyword: Bandwagon effect, Snob effect, Psychological factor, Envy, Inferiority, Superiority, Scarcity, Purchase intention Student Number: 2016-21684