Abstract:

Purpose- The purpose of the current study is to discover the impact of social media influencers' characteristics on Egyptian customers purchasing decisions in the automotive industry through the mediating effect of purchase intention. In this study, Social media influencers' characteristics comprises four factors which are: Source credibility, Source attractiveness, Product match-up, and Meaning transfer.



Design/methodology/approach – The research design is descriptive and quantitative research. Data were gathered from various Sources; Secondary data - were collected from several research papers and websites which deal with research problem topic. Primary Data - were obtained by the E-Questioner method introduced by Google models for applying the questionnaire through the Internet and was filled out with different people. A total of 412 valid responses were obtained.



Findings –The results revealed a substantial positive effect of social media influencers' Attributes on Egyptian purchasing decision in automotive industry. Besides, Purchase intention was found to mediate the association between social media influencers' characteristics and customer purchasing decision



Originality/Value – The current study further expanded the present knowledge by illustrating that the effect social media influencers' characteristics have on customer purchasing decisions is mediated by purchase intention. also, the study employed the strength of the Path Analysis method and Structural Equations Modelling (SEM) method using the Amos program when dealing with higher-order structures, permitting us to build and test such a parsimonious model that is useful for practitioners.