Impact of Social Media Marketing by Apparel Brands on Consumers' Willingness to Pay A Premium: A Study on the Mediating Effect of Consumer Trust

Emerging social media formats and the evolving marketing methods leveraging them have made social media marketing a crucial approach for apparel brands to identify factors contributing to consumers' willingness to pay a premium (WTPP) . To explore the relationship between social media marketing and consumers'WTPP, this study first adopted a literature review method to identify five dimensions of social media marketing: entertainment, interactivity, trendiness, customization, and word-of-mouth (WOM). It then introduced trust as a mediating variable, constructed a theoretical model based on the Stimulus-Organism-Response (SOR) theory, and proposed corresponding hypotheses. An empirical study was conducted using a questionnaire survey method. The results indicate that entertainment, customization, interactivity, and trendiness exert a significant positive impact on consumers' WTPP. In contrast, WOM failed to pass the significance test (p=0.563), thus its impact on the WTPP is not statistically significant. In addition, trust plays a partial mediating role in the impact of the entertainment, customization, and trendiness dimensions of social media marketing on the WTPP. The research findings provide targeted strategic guidance for apparel brands to better achieve premium payment conversion within the social media ecosystem.