“Viral Food” Obsession: Influence of Product Attributes, Personal Attitudes, and Social Group on Consumer’s Purchasing Behaviour

Abstract

The term ‘viral food’ now is a common social media vocabulary where is describe entire marketing campaigns benefited by word-of-mouth among internet community. Viral food defines as a food item produced locally that obtained fame over social media, even it does not need to have a pleasant taste to begin with. Apparently, this ‘viral food’ has achieved its goals in Malaysia where consumer would always seek for it once it widely spread on the internet. Henceforth, this quantitative study was conducted to investigate the consumer behaviour on purchasing ‘viral food’, particularly focusing on product attributes, personal attitudes and social influence. Understanding the drive to buy ‘viral food’ would help derive the most effective ways to improve food marketing and the product as well. Implementing convenience sampling, 400 responses collected using an online questionnaire, Google form, which had been distributed nationwide through emails, telecommunication applications and social media platforms. With OLS regression and ANOVA analysis by using STATA MP 17, results showed that product attributes (β = 0.59) were the most significant factor that urge consumer to purchase, while it also indicated that youngster and middle-income groups had higher possibility to buy ‘viral food’ more, if compared to other market segmentation groups. The findings concluded that consumers perceived those ‘viral food’ marketing through the online community creates an impulse or indicator to them to buy the food and helping to ease their decision-making processes, mainly in food procurement circumstances.