The effect of influencer marketing on consumer purchasing decision in food and beverage industry

Technological developments and the ease of internet access affect the consumers' buying habits and attitudes today. Especially, the fact that using the social media extensively has also facilitated the sharing of feelings, thoughts and evaluations after consumption. Consumers, who want to reference the experiences of different users before purchasing or benefiting, have started to give importance to the opinions of users who share their comments about the products they use or the services they use through social media. This process appears as a new marketing trend. The main problem of this research is how Influencer Marketing (which is translated into Turkish as Hatırlı Pazarlama) and opinion leaders who carry out this action affected consumers and how they differentiated their consumption tendencies. Therefore, the purpose of this thesis study is to investigate how Influencer Marketing to the food and beverage industry affects consumers' purchasing decision process and the level of influence of opinion leaders. The universe of the research; composed of the people who are 18 and older, residing in Turkey and use social media tools. The study is in the nature of "descriptive research", which is one of the quantitative research methods. In the study, survey technique was used as a data collection tool. The questionnaire was created using the questionnaire form of the website Surveey.com. The link on the Internet was distributed on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and Instagram, so participants were allowed to participate in the survey. According to the findings based on the statistical analysis of the data obtained with the participation of 4010 individuals, it was found that the effect of Influencer Marketing on consumer behavior before purchasing varies statistically according to the gender of the participants, age groups, marital status, education level, time spent on the internet and social media daily. The benefits of these findings to the stakeholders of the food and beverage industry and new research in this area constitute the importance dimension of this research.