Academic Research: High Quality Creative Unlocks Consumer Trust and Purchase Intent

High quality brand creative distributed through channels familiar to consumers drives exponential trust and purchase intent.

A recent study in the Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services proves this out through Amal Dabbous and Karine Aoun Barakat’s work ‘Bridging the online offline gap: Assessing the impact of brands’ social network content quality on brand awareness and purchase intention.’  Dabbous and Barakat explore the interplay between brand content quality, and brand interactivity on purchase intention. 

Dabbous and Barakat specifically examined how social content and offline purchase intent are driven by affective motivation, consumer engagement, and established brand awareness. The researchers sampled millennials, focusing on their interactions with sportswear brands. 

Their findings reinforce the primacy of the brand in establishing these interactions, even in an online-to-offline model.

• The positive relationship between brand and consumer engagement is driven primarily through [brand] content quality. 
• Furthermore, it was found that the aggregate effectiveness of brand awareness affects purchase intention at the greatest rate. 

Dabbous and Barakat find that “brand awareness and consumer engagement have a positive, significant impact on offline purchase intention.” Yet, their research reveals that engagement alone is insufficient, as it is actually the brand awareness and brand content quality that are the stronger drivers of purchase intention. In other words, distributing content collaboratively only works well if the content is of high quality. As such, brands with the highest quality content win out, and the contexts that allow for the greatest interactivity are driven by consumer’s established brand awareness. Learn more about how collaborative advertising dramatically increases content quality and brand awareness through a more personalized, localized approach to social advertising.