The impacts of food vlog attributes via instagram users on parasocial interaction and behavior intention in Malaysia / Nurul Iman Abd. Razak

Foodservice industry today relies on many kinds of technologies for different functions such as ordering, producing, delivering, and even presenting the menu. Foodservice industry grabs this opportunity to evolve especially in the marketing aspects in expanding the businesses in the new era of modernization. E-commerce is recognized as one of the initiatives to reach customers and gain better information. Online reviews such as food vlogs are parts of e-commerce which are believed to be the current trend among customers. This research seeks to understand the food vlog’s attributes that lead to parasocial interaction and its impacts on customers’ recommendation adoption. This area of study is rarely discovered in Malaysia thus it will provide a new knowledge specifically the parasocial interaction in relation to the foodservice industry. It will also help the vlogger communities to identify the most influential attributes that keep people watching and believing in their contents and consequently visit the restaurants or consume the food the vloggers' review. This study applied quantitative research design through self-distributed online questionnaire and applied cross-sectional study. The questionnaire has been answered individually in this study. Data were taken from 421 respondents which was gathered from the total of 11,863,000 Instagram users in Malaysia. This research is based on data obtained from survey questionnaire that polled from respondents who ever watched food vlog reviews on Instagram. The research suggested that positive behavioral intention is influenced by good attributes of vlogs; appearance, video quality, and homophily. The results of study also suggested that parasocial interaction approach is needed for the attributes to successfully result the positive behavioral intention. The scarcity of literature specifically on parasocial interaction and homophily through vlog in Malaysia, universities closured and restriction to meet the respondents in person (only use Google Form questionnaire) due to pandemic of Covid-19, and the existing of other social media platforms that are more convenient and interesting booming nowadays are the limitations of this study. The possible future improvement also provided in this study. It is hope that the study can contribute to the improvement of the food vlogs’ quality as marketing tool in Malaysia.