The Role of Influencer Marketing in Boosting Demand Forecast Accuracy for Saudi Arabian Supply Chains in the E-commerce Sector: A Qualitative Approach

In this paper, we investigate how influencer marketing helps improve the accuracy of Saudi Arabian eCommerce supply chain quality forecasts. With explosive growth in e-commerce prevailing across Saudi Arabia, enterprises today face greater difficulty in accurately forecasting consumer demand within the context of a fluid digital landscape. Much of the time forecasting behaves traditionally, it is sorely inadequate to keep pace with social media-driven consumer behavior. The current research provides qualitative evidence from supply chain managers and marketing professionals on how such metrics e.g. likes, shares, comments etc., fashionably employed to measure the success of influencer campaigns can be assimilated within demand forecasting models through interviews conducted under an interpretive paradigm making it a pragmatics guided study. The results demonstrate how utilizing data and predicting influencer marketing trends can create an enormous competitive advantage by improving the forecasting capabilities for any e-commerce-focused supply chain operation. The two scenarios outlined in the paper are finished by providing practical advice for using influencer data with existing demand forecasting models.