The Role of Social Media in Shaping Consumer Purchase Intentions Towards Boycotted Food and Beverage Franchises

Abstract

This research explores the role of social media in shaping consumer purchase intentions toward boycotted food and beverage franchises, focusing on four critical factors: source of updates, recommendations, ease of access and interaction with information, popularity endorsement by an influencer or expert. Using the Tenets of the Theory of Planned Behavior, this work analyzes these factors in relation to the consumer decision process during boycott campaigns. Responding to these questions quantitatively, a structured survey was conducted on 384 social media users in Islamabad. Regression and correlation coefficients show that all four independent variables are significantly and positively related to purchase intentions cross-sectionally. This action resulted in influencer endorsement and experience sharing showing the highest predictive power in explaining the influence processes at work, proving that trust, realistic role modelling, and perceived norms of friends and peers were important factors. The study results emphasize that comprehensible updates and convenient platforms should be valued to increase consumer interest. These findings will benefit marketing scholars, political analysts, and other stakeholders in marketing with an understanding of navigation of boycott campaigns on social media. The emphasis in the study is on the four interrelated solutions, which address key areas for repairing trust and reorientation of consumers; these include 1) authentic influencer partnership, 2) clear and open information sharing, 3) genuine consumers’ co-creation. Moreover, it accentuates how social media has redefined the way consumers mobilize themselves to act in a market and on the way social issues are being negotiated. Nevertheless, the findings of the work contain certain limitations: the authors investigated only one spatial area and limited set of predictors, so other populations and other factors might be specified for further investigation.