The influence of review formats on consumers' purchasing intention of fitness supplements.

The purpose of this research is to find the most effective review format in terms of purchase intentions by which fitness influencers post product recommendations on social media platforms. Two frequently used formats are being compared in this study: the product-only format and the influencer-included format. A sub-objective of this research is to examine the relationship between source credibility and purchase intention in influencer marketing. Correlations between source credibility characteristics and purchase intention are used to determine the most effective format. Data was collected using an online experiment with a between subjects design and was later analyzed using SPSS. The findings of this research support earlier findings that source credibility has a significantly positive relationship with purchase intentions. As for review formats, no statistically significant differences were found between the majority of the source characteristics. This study did find that consumer perceive an influencer as more likeable when he is not visually present in the product review as a significantly higher mean score was found for the product-only format as opposed to the influencer-included format. Moreover, no evidence was found that the influencer-included format leads to higher purchase intentions.