The effect of opinion leadership and spirituality on recycling intention: insights from attractive, expert and religious influencers

Purpose

The present study investigates the impact of opinion leadership and spirituality from three types of social media influencers (SMIs) on individuals’ intentions to conduct recycling. This research is driven by the opinion leadership theory demonstrated by influencer marketing.

Design/methodology/approach

This research applies a between-subject experiment to measure the impact of the proposed model. Each participant was exposed to a different influencer: an attractive influencer (Treatment 1, n = 101), an expert influencer (Treatment 2, n = 94), a religious influencer (Treatment 3, n = 99) and a control condition (Treatment 4, n = 102). An ANOVA post-hoc analysis was conducted to further assess the impact dynamics of each influencer based on different demographics such as age, income and level of education. More than 95% of the samples consist of Muslims.

Findings

Findings revealed the different dynamics of the effect of opinion leadership and spirituality on the intention to recycle from utilising different types of influencers. Samples derived from a high socio-economic background and exposed to the religious influencer (Treatment 3) have a relatively higher mean score. In general, younger participants with lower incomes and levels of education have less tendency to conduct recycling.

Originality/value

This research attempts to fill the gap in the impact of influencer marketing on green behaviour adoption with the inclusion of spirituality, which has been largely ignored in this context. It offers insights from the perspective of a developing economy that has one of the largest percentages of social media users in the world and from a country that regards a relationship with God as important.