Food influencers play an important role in shaping consumer behavior. However, little is understood about how food influencers affect brand co-creation and its subsequent effects on consumer purchasing intentions of branded organic food products. Therefore, this study cross-fertilizes the heuristic systematic model (HSM) with social presence theory (SPT) to investigate how content quality, credibility, and social presence of an influencer affect brand co-creation and purchasing intention of organic foods.
The study involved a sample size of 280 respondents who actively interact with Tanzanian food influencers on Instagram. Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) was used for data analysis.
The results indicate that content quality, credibility, and social presence influence brand co-creation. Besides, unlike content quality and credibility, the effect of social presence on brand co-creation is moderated by homophily. Additionally, brand co-creation impacts consumers’ purchasing intentions of organic food brands.
By integrating HSM with SPT, this study offers a novel understanding of how consumers make decisions to co-create and purchase in the food industry. Combining HSM with SPT enriches the explanatory power of the HSM’s dual-process framework by positioning social presence, along with credibility and homophily as heuristic cues and content quality as systematic cues in explaining consumer behavior in the food sector.
