Investigating the Effect of Price Image and Social Media on Customers’ Intention to Purchase

Achieving a sustainable competitive advantage is one of the most essentials that retailers should pursue. Therefore, influencing the subjective norms of customers can result in the most fruitful outcome for this purpose. The main goal of this research was to investigate the effect of price image and social media on customers’ intention to purchase, with the mediating effects of their attitude and satisfaction. This research was applied and descriptive-survey correlational in terms of the type and the method. The statistical population of the research was the people who had the shopping experience from the hypermarkets/supermarkets in Tehran. The data were collected by using a questionnaire. The validity of the questionnaire was confirmed through the content validity. Also, the reliability of the questionnaire was verified through Cronbach’s alpha coefficient. According to the Cochran’s formula, 387 questionnaires were distributed in the target population by the simple random sampling method. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was used to test the research hypotheses. The results showed that retailers/supermarkets can influence customers’ intention to purchase and their attitude and satisfaction by making a suitable price image of themselves. They can also use social media to influence the attitude and satisfaction of their customers in a desirable way. In this study, the effect of social media on the customers’ intention to purchase was not confirmed. This could be due to the economic situations, an unfavorable content, or retailers’ immaturity of using social media effectively. For this reason, retailers are advised to use social media to influence the customers’ subjective elements to affect their future behavioral intentions.