Perfume Influencers Impact on Customers' Purchase Decision of HMNS Perfumery

ABSTRACT: Nowadays, due to the fast growth of social media, the number of people using social media increases day-by-day. Influencer is one marketing strategy that has been used by marketers to strengthen brands' reputations. Hence, the use of digital platforms as a marketing channel has increased. Influencer marketing has been observed whereby well-known social media users are employed by brands to promote their products. However, the problem in the perfume industry's marketing is that it differs from other things in that its function and utility can be proved and seen easily, whereas it does not apply in the perfume industry.  Fragrance is considered to be a personal preference. Online descriptions rarely correspond to what the consumer imagines. Customers will not know how the perfume smells unless they read other people's reviews on the internet. Therefore, the author wants to delve more into the impact of those people who are known as perfume influencers evaluations on HMNS brand consumer purchase decisions. This study was created to fill this gap. The purpose of this study is to explore the effect of social media influencers on HMNS Perfumery customer’s decision in purchasing perfume. This paper adopted the Ohanian model of source credibility since the authors aim to examine association between SMIs’ perceived attractiveness, trustworthiness, and expertise. For perfume influencer there is also one competence which the author assumes is needed to have, which is storytelling competence. The relationship between brand image and purchasing decision of perfume was then also investigated. The survey method was used as the research method. Online questionnaire was employed to gather primary data from the respondents in Indonesia. A total of 265 sample HMNS Perfumery customers participated in the survey and collected data was analyzed using PLS-SEM analysis with WarpPLS 8.0 software. Trustworthiness and expertise were found to have substantial impacts to increase brand image. Meanwhile, attractiveness and storytelling competence is not significant for the brand image increase. The results also showed that there was a favorable connection between brand image toward perfume influencers and their decisions to purchase fragrances. In addition to highlighting the study's contributions to theory and practice, this paper also emphasizes those contributions.