2025/09/17 by Jerum William Kilumile, Li Zuo, Johakim Katekele John
Business, Management and Accounting · Social Sciences · #Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification #Digital Marketing and Social Media #Service and Product Innovation
paper · doi:10.1108/bfj-01-2025-0095
openalex publication_date 2025/09/17 · crossref created 2025/09/17 · crossref issued 2025/09/18 · crossref published 2025/09/18 · crossref published-online 2025/09/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · crossref published-print 2026/01/16 · crossref deposited 2026/03/20 · crossref indexed 2026/07/30 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Purpose Food influencers play an important role in shaping consumer behavior. However, little is understood about how food influencers affect brand co-creation and its subsequent effects on consumer purchasing intentions of branded organic food products. Therefore, this study cross-fertilizes the heuristic systematic model (HSM) with social presence theory (SPT) to investigate how content quality, credibility, and social presence of an influencer affect brand co-creation and purchasing intention of organic foods. Design/methodology/approach The study involved a sample size of 280 respondents who actively interact with Tanzanian food influencers on Instagram. Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) was used for data analysis. Findings The results indicate that content quality, credibility, and social presence influence brand co-creation. Besides, unlike content quality and credibility, the effect of social presence on brand co-creation is moderated by homophily. Additionally, brand co-creation impacts consumers’ purchasing intentions of organic food brands. Originality/value By integrating HSM with SPT, this study offers a novel understanding of how consumers make decisions to co-create and purchase in the food industry. Combining HSM with SPT enriches the explanatory power of the HSM’s dual-process framework by positioning social presence, along with credibility and homophily as heuristic cues and content quality as systematic cues in explaining consumer behavior in the food sector.