Drawn on Uses and gratifications theory (UGT), this study analyzes the influence of customers' digital content marketing (DCM) motivations on their purchase intention on e-commerce platform. By using quantitative methods with a sample size of 414 young customers and Partial Least Squares (PLS-SEM) to test the conceptual model, the research results indicated that information, entertainment and remuneration have a positive impact on customer passive use, which can lead to purchase intention. Thus, our study extends the UGT research by introducing a theoretical framework of DCM and advancing our understanding of how to promote online purchase intention. Our framework may provide managers insights into their digital marketing strategy and help them make use of customers' passive use e-commerce platforms to enhance sales.
The Internet is developing rapidly that provides brand opportunities to sell products to
customers through e-commerce platforms
Regarding online shopping, Pavlou (2003) defined purchase intention as customers’ willingness to engage in an online transaction, which can drive in more sales. While competition among online vendors becomes stronger, understanding customer behavior through purchase intention as well as the effective way to communicate with them is gaining importance. The report of We Are Social (2021) also pointed out that 85.5 percent of Vietnamese Internet users have already searched for a product to buy. However, few recent studies relating to online purchase intention have investigated how to enhance customers’ intention to buy via providing value content. Consequently, the ecommerce managers still have no instructions to deliver brand-related content to customers based on their needs to promote them to buy products. Thus, our study will fill this gap by exploring the way to develop customers’ purchase intention via their passive use, considering if there is a difference among males and females. Hence, the purpose of our study is to (1) enhance understanding of customer motivation relating to brand’s DCM; (2) develop a conceptualization of DCM in e-commerce; (3) suggest a guidance regarding efficient DCM strategy for brand managers on e-commerce platforms. 2 2.1
Customers are becoming to doubt advertising and other traditional marketing
communications, thus setting the stage for the growth of DCM
Uses and gratifications theory (UGT) has been widely applied to assess people's
motivation to use media. In contrast to effects-oriented research traditions that take the view
of the communicator, UGT examines media effects from the perspective of the
individual user
What digital content marketing works for e-commerce platforms? 201 of Piehler et al. (2019) to comprehend the DCM motivations through four factors: information, entertainment, social interaction, and remuneration, which are the most applied to understanding the customers' activities relating to brand-related content.
E-commerce platforms have added several functions which allow customers to consume brand-related content from firms or other customers (e.g., Shopee Feed of Shopee). Muntinga et al. (2011) argued that these activities represent the engagement of passive customers, who consume by reading reviews or following home pages of a brand. Thus, by consuming brand-related content on e-commerce platforms, customers can satisfy their needs through the brand's DCM. Gainous et al. (2021) considered passive use to have the same meaning as “consumption” of social media, which was defined by Muntinga et al. (2011). Thus, this research argues that the literature relating to content consumption can be used to build the theoretical basis of passive use. 2.4
Most industries concentrate on enhancing customers’ purchase intention. In the context
of e-commerce, purchase intention is the state when a customer is willing to enter into
an online transaction (Pavlou, 200
Digital content marketing motivations are considered to drive positively customers’
passive use. Foremost, information motivation refers the customers' search for
information about products, reviews of others or any information relating to their purchase
or use of the brand's products
According to Flynn et al. (1996), customers regularly seek guidance and permission before deciding to buy a product. Thus, they tend to browse an online community or read reviews from others to obtain necessary information. As such when customers are gratified by consuming brand-related content, they will have more willingness to buy. Additionally, Pöyry et al. (2013) point out that when customers repeat browsing brand home page, customers will visit online communities with stronger needs to purchase in mind. This study argues that e-commerce users (also online customers) can be enhanced purchase intention through consuming brand-related content.
Moreover, some consumer behavior analyses show that males and females differ in
information processing
H3: The relationship between passive use and purchase intention is stronger for females than for males. 4
This study conducted a survey through questionnaires to collect primary data. The questionnaire aims to collect customers’ opinion about DCM motivation, their passive use and purchase intention on Shopee. The questionnaire was built in English, then translated to Vietnamese. It consists of three parts. Specifically, part 1 provides an introduction, part 2 is to obtain respondent’s personal information, and part 3 includes all items to measure six constructs. The scale items were measured by a Likert scale ranging from 1 to 5 to represent “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree” and were adopted from previous studies. Particularly, DCM consists of four factors adopted from de Vries et al. (2017); Passive use’s scales were developed by Schivinski et al. (2016) and purchase intention were from Schivinski and Dabrowski (2016). Besides, the respondents were
What digital content marketing works for e-commerce platforms? 203 over 18 years old from The University of Danang - University of Economics as well as followers of Nescafé on Shopee platform. Moreover, to perform and analysis data, this study used Microsoft Excel, SPSS version 24 and SmartPLS 3.0. 5 5.1
In total, most (69.1%) of respondents are from 18 to 20, 52.4% of respondents have monthly income from 1 million VND to 5 million VND. Due to the aim of examining the moderator effect of gender on purchase intention, the number of male and female respondents is nearly equal (203 men and 211 women). Moreover, most (88.9%) of respondents confirmed to access Shopee regularly every day. 5.2
Construct reliability was measured through testing the extent to which items are free of
random errors and expose persistent results. When Cronbach’s alpha and Composite
reliability (CR) of all constructs are larger than 0.7, the standard of reliability is
accepted
Convergent validity was measured by assessing via two criteria: (1) factor loading
of each item exceeded 0.7
Discriminant validity was measured using the square root of the AVE by a structure
from its indicators that must exceed that structure's correlation with other structures
According to Henseler et al. (2014), SRMR (Standardized Root Mean Square Residual)
is a good indicator to assess the suitability of a model to its sample. This index is
expected to be <0.08 or 0.1
What digital content marketing works for e-commerce platforms? 205 study of Muntinga et al. (2011). In terms of information, customers are becoming depending on others’ experiences about a brand/product, which leads to more regularity in their content consumption. Besides, customers who have higher entertainment motivation tend to consume brand-related content. This can be explained by the strong impact of Covid-19 pandemic, which gives most people fear and facilitates them to pass time and escape from reality. Moreover, Piehler et al. (2019) stated that remuneration content requires a more active level of customers’ participation (e.g., commenting, sharing), thus remuneration has no effect on content consumption. This study argued that before customers have more active use, they have to consume DCM passively. Hence, remuneration affects passive use positively.
In contrast, when social interaction is well drawn in previous social media studies
The result also showed that customers’ passive use influences positively on their
purchase intention in the context of e-commerce, which is consistent with the outcomes
of previous social media studies
Based on the research results, this study provides some practical implications. First,
besides adding three characteristics (e.i. information, entertainment, and remuneration)
into the brand's DCM to facilitate customer passive use, brand managers on
e-commerce platforms should promote customer feedback about product/brand via
remuneration (e.g., gifts, coupons) to enrich the source of reliable information. Second,
e-commerce developers should aim to create new features such as group/community to
improve social interaction among customers, which can lead to their passive use
This study still has some limitations. First, only gender was examined as a moderating variable between customers’ passive use and purchase intention. Further research can consider other variables such as ages, incomes, etc. Second, the research was conducted in only Danang, the generalisability of these findings is limited. Thus, there is a need to examine the research in other cities or nations. Third, this study only accessed customers’ purchase intention, further research should explore their actual online behavior.
What digital content marketing works for e-commerce platforms? 207