Impact of Social Media Influencer Marketing on Purchase Intention of Cosmetic Industry in Sri Lanka with the Mediating Effect of Customer Attitude

Abstract

Social media influencers in Sri Lanka are heavily endorsing cosmetic products without proper awareness; this careless advertising often leads to toxic ingredients and potential health risks for users. Marketing fallacies, greenwashing, and biased narratives exacerbate the lack of regulations in the industry. Investigating how social media influencers affect consumers' purchase intentions in the Sri Lankan cosmetics market is crucial. The study fills in important gaps in the literature by concentrating on the understudied area of social media influence in the context of Sri Lanka and discussing potential risks connected to influencers recommending cosmetic items without thorough knowledge. The theoretical framework based on the Ohanian Model of Source Credibility places social media influencers as independent variables, purchase intention as the dependent variable, and customer attitude as the mediating variable. Rigorous reliability and validity evaluations have been used to verify the robustness of measuring scales. Correlation analyses confirmed strong positive correlations between the variables and a normal distribution. The study supported four hypotheses, highlighting the influence of social media on consumer attitude, customer attitude on purchase intention, social media's influence on purchasing intention, and customer attitude as a mediator. These results demonstrate the important roles that social media and customer attitude play in influencing purchase intentions and contribute substantially to our knowledge of the dynamics of consumer behaviour in the social media realm.