Browsing by Author "Guruge, M. C. B."

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Comparison between Attributes related to Celebrity Endorsement and Social Media Influencer Marketing: A Conceptual Review
(Department of Marketing Management, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2018) Guruge, M. C. B.
Influencer marketing is one of the emerging tools in the field of marketing and it is an area that has gained the attention of the researchers. The concept of social influencers has evolved with the rapid popularity of using peer reviews, comments and tweets on products and services when making the purchasing decisions. Subsequently the marketers have identified the vitality of user-generated content and leveraging the power of social influencers in order to promote their brands. However, there is always a grey area about the return on investment of this tool from the client’s perspective. In contrary, the customer also have a doubt on whether the information provided by influencers are credible and unbiased. Most of the previous studies were conducted to investigate the impact of social influencers on purchasing intention, attitudes and public perception on social influencers and different attributes related to social influencers. Thus, limited number of researches have provided constructive models to analyze the attributes related to influencer marketing which affects the purchasing intention. In line with this concept, this paper reveals whether the models that are associated with celebrity endorsement such as source credibility model and attractiveness model can be adapted in order to identify the attributes related to social influencers. Furthermore, some of the new attributes were incorporated to the existing models as well. A deductive method was employed and extensive literature review was carried out as the main research tool in order to highlight the contextual explanations about the concept and finally, the paper presents future research directions in the field of social influencers.
Impact of Social Media Marketing in Selecting Sri Lanka as a Tourist Destination
(Faculty of Commerce and Management Studies University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2020) Sarathchandra., A. B. S. P.; Wijesundara, C. B.; Guruge, M. C. B.
Social media provides a platform for the tourism service providers to market their products and services at a lower cost. As tourist arrival to Sri Lanka has been increasing, interested stakeholders have started using social media marketing as a tool to promote Sri Lanka. Since only a limited number of studies have been carried out on the impact of social media marketing on the Sri Lankan tourism industry, this study was carried out to address this research gap. Subsequently, the study examines the impact of social media marketing, social media marketing content and social media marketing characteristics on the decision of travel destinations of tourists arriving in Sri Lanka. After studying many researches that have been carried out in other countries, the conceptual framework was developed based on the available literature. Simple random sampling technique was applied to choose the respondents from the population and an online survey was carried out to collect data using a Google survey questionnaire and SPSS was utilized for data analysis. Based on the results, it was found that information, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and electronic word of mouth has a positive relationship with purchase decision. However, perceived risk shows a negative relationship.