A daydreaming consumer: Evaluating the impact of social media advertising content on ‘insta’ purchasing.

Abstract

As brands today are adapting to the growing popularity of social media sites, consumers are becoming more and more absorbed in the content they are exposed to. For brands, it is important to understand how the content they share influences consumer buying patterns and how they contribute to consumers’ daydreaming states. This study investigates daydreaming with new conceptualisation within a digital context. It explores the relationships between social media content and its ability to transmit consumers into a daydreaming state, whilst investigating the impact this has on impulsive purchasing. This as a result presents original findings which can help brands understand new relationships between social media content and consumer behaviour. Existing literature has been found to explore daydreaming on a conceptual level and there has been vast investigation into impulsive purchasing; however, there is no literature that directly measures daydreaming in a social media context, nor is there contribution that combines the two. Thus, this research aims to close this gap in research, where academic literature is lacking. This research adopted a deductive approach, using an online quasi-experimental survey. Analysis confirmed the conceptualisation of daydreaming to be valid and concluded that social media content type does not play a role in transmitting consumers into a daydreaming state. Daydreaming was found to be the mediator between social media content and impulsive purchasing, with the relationship between daydreaming and impulsive purchasing found to be significant. Noticeable differences were established in the daydreaming simulation of impulsive purchasing, with escapism being more significant for the male sample and imagination holding more weight for the female sample. The findings have been able to produce valuable insight into daydreaming within the social media context, which should be addressed by brands to engage a suitable social media strategy.