Decoding Source Credibility: How it Influences Trust in Informative Brand-Related Content and Customer Purchase Intentions

Purpose As influencers build their follower base by sharing content in a particular niche (Lou and Yuan, 2019;Saima and Khan, 2020), influencer credibility greatly affects followers' perceived trust in brand-related content they share on social media (Lou and Yuan, 2019).Brand content can be categorized in various ways (Coelho et al., 2016;Luarn et al., 2015;Tafesse and Wien, 2017).Different categorizations proposed by multiple authors (Coelho et al., 2016;Luarn et al., 2015;Tafesse and Wien, 2017) identify one common type of brandrelated content: informative content.Hovland and Weiss (1951) highlight the significance of the message source's credibility in enhancing the persuasiveness of the message.Influencers, seen as credible sources of information, effectively inspire shopping aspirations (Ohanian, 1990;Van der Waldt et al., 2009).Influencers' posts serve as marketing signals to their followers i.e. potential customers given that a marketing signal is a piece of information that a customer can request and process with minimal effort (Nafees et al., 2020;Bloom and Reve, 1990).According to market signaling theory, the one who presents or represents the product to others also represents a type of marketing signal (Nafees et al., 2020;Bloom and Reve, 1990).Thus, influencers, or influential individuals (Batra et al., 1996), by demonstrating the use of a product (Spry et al., 2011) become marketing signals themselves.The effectiveness of these marketing signals is heavily reliant on the credibility of the signal sender (Herbig and Milewicz, 1996).Furthermore, source credibility is comprised of several dimensions, including expertise, trustworthiness (Hovland et al., 1953), and attractiveness (McGuire, 1985).Ohanian (1990) defines credibility as a combination of trustworthiness, expertise, and attractiveness.Lou and Yuan (2019) add an additional dimension i.e. similarity.Also, Xiao et al. (2018) emphasize a four-dimensional structure focusing on expertise, trustworthiness, likability, and similarity.By incorporating a five-dimensional credibility construct this research represents a unique approach to determining the influence of source credibility on customer's trust in informative brand-related content and the influence of trust in brand-related content on customer's purchase intentions.The paper is the first to use the following source credibility dimensions: trustworthiness, attractiveness, expertise, likability, and similarity.Therefore, the main motivation of this paper is to address the research gap on how influencers' credibility affects followers' trust in informative brand-related content and their subsequent purchase intentions, particularly by examining the comprehensive five-dimensional construct of source credibility, which has not yet been thoroughly explored in previous studies.The focus is on trust in informative brand-related content since social media users primarily use social networks to