A Study on the Effect of Parasocial Relationship Created on Influencer Marketing to Consumer Purchase Intention: Focusing on Luxury Brand Consumers in China and Thailand

Due to the development of the IT industry and the increasing penetration of smartphones, various social media platforms have been showing high growth since their emergence. Along with this growth, the commerce market utilizing social media is also growing rapidly. Based on this social background, a new marketing concept called influencer has emerged. As a person who influences others on SNS, influencers have become a major marketing strategy on SNS platforms because they present attractive content to consumers and provide marketing tailored to their personal preferences. To investigate how consumers' parasocial relationships with newly emerged influencers in the new media era affect their purchase intention toward products, an empirical analysis was conducted using luxury brands from Chinese and Thai consumers. The results show that in both countries, prestige and interaction have a positive effect on parasocial relationships, and that parasocial relationships influence purchase intention. The results suggest that for influencer marketing to be successful on a global scale, an influencer's reputation and high interaction with consumers can increase purchase intention.