The Relationship of Facebook Messenger Marketing to the Purchasing Intention of the Consumers of Philippine MSMEs

Abstract

Philippines, as the social media capital of the world, has the highest social media usage rate, with over 60% higher than the average rate for other countries and which amounts to an average of 11 hours of usage per day, as of 2021. Compared to over 9 hours per day last 2019, it is evident that the pandemic caused a spike in the statistics since more people are on their phones while staying at home. From the start of the pandemic, the use of social media platforms including Facebook Messenger for marketing product and service offerings from MSMEs has also increased. The restrictions brought upon by the rise of COVID-19, made MSMEs integrate the use of these platforms to market their products and connect with their consumers by providing online customer service. 300 respondents were asked to answer the survey which involves questions about service/web qualities and purchase intention to which the researchers discovered the significance of informativeness, assurance, and empathy towards the purchase intention of the consumers in encountering messages from MSMEs on Facebook Messenger. It was found that web and service quality factors affect the purchase intention of the respondents positively to a certain degree. This study has shown that most people prefer to use Facebook Messenger when it comes to purchasing things online. Different levels of significance with purchase intention were found among different factors of marketing messages sent through Facebook Messenger. Informativeness, assurance, and empathy are the ones that are significantly correlated with purchase intention. Whereas Access, Reliability, and Responsibility have a lower significance with Purchase Intention.