The Role of Personality Traits and Advertisement Characteristics in Social Shopping. An experimental study of personality and Instagram marketing

Objectives The main objective of this study is addressing a gap in existing research by looking into the role of The Big Five personality traits in the context of social shopping. Second, this study seeks to find different characteristics of Instagram advertisements that enhance a consumers likelihood to purchase. Summary A literature review was constructed in order to explore the current academic research about social shopping and personality. Based on the literature review, ten hypotheses were proposed in addition to presenting a conceptual framework. The hypotheses and the conceptual framework were utilized to guide the collection of primary data. The data was gathered quantitatively through an online questionnaire which included a brief Big Five personality test (Gosling et al., 2003), questions that measured intention to participate in social shopping activities and purchase intention via social media networks and finally an experimental Instagram part. The questionnaire was constructed to meet the research objectives of this study. Conclusions The Big Five personality traits were not found to have significant relationship with social commerce intention or purchase intention on social media. Likes on Instagram and trust were found to indicate purchase intention. Hashtags were not found to impact purchase intention or attitudes towards the brand. People with high neuroticism were found to have a high immediate purchase intention