The Effects of Korean Celebrities on Millennial & Gen Z Purchase Intention on Indonesia’s Beauty Industry

This research aims to find the effect of using Korean celebrities towards purchase intention using several criteria in Indonesia’s beauty industry. The data were collected by distributing online surveys to the public with age criteria of Gen-Z and Millenials in Indonesia who like or adore Korean celebrities. Thus, Convenience sampling method was applied. Questionnaires acquired and recorded using a five point comparative scale. Exploratory factor and multiple regression analysis were used in analyzing criteria on customers’ purchase intention. Three aspects affecting purchase intention were identified, namely, connectedness towards celebrities, attitude towards celebrities


Introduction
Marketing is an activity of promoting a product at the right time and place at a defined price for such product.Marketing revolves around four main elements or components generally known as four PS or Marketing Mix, they are Product, Price, Place and Promotion.To overcome the denigrations, "People, Process and Physical evidence" also became a part of the marketing mix (Akshaya & Deepalakshmi, 2019).
A study revealed that the endorsement by celebrities (Mukhopadhyay, A., Sinha, A., & Nataraajan, R., 2018) is more effective in medium to high impact rather than using non-celebrity due to several factors a celebrity has, such as the celebrity's attractiveness, trustworthiness and their perceived expertise.The type of service or product being advertised can also affect the effectiveness of a celebrity endorsement based on factors mentioned above.That is why marketers see celebrities as one of the most effective ways to market their products to the general public.A brand or business will work with celebrities in various ways like advertisements, endorsements, live paid, or giveaways.Tran, Yazdanparast, & Strutton, (2019) researched the impact in marketing with regards to endorsers on consumers' connectedness to celebrities using a tests model resulted in four variables related with celebrities endorsing products such as connectedness, attitudes, receptivity towards message, and purchase intention of the products offered.A separate study in the Philippines also shows that endorsement by local or domestic celebrities is more effective than foreign celebrities (Wang & Centeno, 2020).and celebrities explains the persuasion power of celebrities over consumers (Hwang and Zhang, 2018).Therefore, this ultimate benefit of celebrities can be cultivated to promote a product, influence consumers to buy as an affirmation and demonstration of the loyalty of consumers to the celebrities (Frimpong et al., 2019).Besides, purchasing the product which is endorsed by the celebrities by the consumer has a hidden motive that the consumer could imitate their favorite celebrities.So, the hypothesis form such as below :

Hypothesis (H1) :
The more connected between consumers and Korean celebrities, the higher the degree of purchase intentions of consumers which are endorsed by their favorite celebrities.
Attitude is defined as someone's overall affective responses -favorable or unfavorable -of a concept that is associated with physical and social objects, such as products, brands, people, etc. and have effect on customer purchase decision.(Wang et al., 2021).Thus, attitude towards celebrities is explained as consumer's favorable or unfavorable responses towards celebrities.

Attitude towards celebrities is identified
as the attributes associated with stronger attractions for celebrities.This argument is supported by the concept of parasocial relationships (Hwang and Zhang, 2018).
Parasocial relationships explains that one person (e.g.consumer) develops emotional responses in a one-way interaction to another person (e.g.celebrities) (Kowert and Daniel Jr., 2021).Despite the unreciprocated emotional responses, consumers still have strong connections with these celebrities and are considered significant (Tran et al., 2019;Kowert and Daniel Jr., 2021).These responses that consumers feel with celebrities actuate interpersonal involvement through media persona by self-referencing which represent the celebrities.The activation of involvement in consumers stimulates favorable feelings towards celebrities, which influence consumer's judgment and willingness to purchase the endorsed product (Centeno and Wang, 2020;Tran et al., 2019).This argument is supported by previous research that revealed attitudes toward objects (e.g.celebrities) are positively related to the willingness to purchase the product which is endorsed (Tran et al., 2019;Lili et al., 2022).For consumers that have higher intention in purchasing endorsed products, may indicate that respondents have favorable attitudes towards celebrities.Thus, we propose hypothesis as follow: Hypothesis (H2): The more favorable attitudes of consumers toward Korean celebrities, the higher the level of consumer's purchase intentions to the product which is endorsed by their favorite celebrities.A total of questionnaire collected were 521, while only 350 passed the filter questions and were used to be analyzed further.
The questionnaire is composed of 24 questions which 4 of them were filter questions.The questions were adjusted from prior research regarding purchase intentions (Table 4).All items in the questionnaire used the Likert scale method, where 1 means strongly disagree, whereas 5 means strongly agree, and 3 means neutral.

Statistical client SPSS ver 25 was utilized
to analyze statistical analysis.Descriptive statistics were used to determine the demographic profile of those who responded, which contain mean value as well as standard deviations.Correlation analysis was utilized to determine the intensity of the connection between the variables, exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was generated to identify whether the data is reliable and valid.Lastly, multiple regression analysis was utilized to get the information of the length to which independent variables affect the dependent variable.

Result and Discussion
The respondents of this research are people who have Korean celebrities favorites, use makeup, and also millennial and gen z generations.Among the total of 350 respondents, 4.57% were male and 95.43% were female, 47.11% were millennials and 52.86% were Gen Z, 55.43% favorite Idol and 44.57% favorite actor.The detailed information about the characteristics of the respondents can be seen in Table 1.And the Descriptive statistics of the variables are shown in Table 2.
Source : Questionnaire Korean Celebrity to Purchase Intentions, 2022

Table 1 Demographic Characteristic of respondents
The research used Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO), where the criteria of the items must be greater than 0.5, Exploratory factor analysis was also performed to see whether the items that measure the construct correctly to the Table 4 shows the lists of factor loadings, Cronbach's alpha, and also lists the items of the attributes.It can be concluded that all of the items in this study fulfilled the validity and reliability measure.Before performing a regression analysis, multicollinearity issues must be evaluated.
When there is a high correlation between   Multiple regression analysis was used to evaluate the hypotheses and the influence of perceived differences in connectedness towards celebrities as brand ambassadors, attitudes toward celebrities, and celebrities' cause-fit on purchase intention.Because each of the items were measured using the same scale, the parameter estimates in this study were standardized regression coefficients (b).
Figure 1 and Table 4 show all of the statistically significant t-values (p-value 0.05).
The findings showed that every single independent variable in this study had a significant impact on Purchase Intention.
The most statistically significant coefficient value was for perceived differences in connectedness to celebrities (b = 0.659, p 0.01).The relationship between connectedness  REFERENCES

The
Korean wave has been a global phenomenon over the last decade, sweeping people all around the globe with their latest dramas, music, dances and trends.With their increasing popularity and demand, cosmetic brands have been riding the Korean wave as well, one of the ways is by appointing Korean celebrities as brand ambassadors for their brand to boost their consumers' purchase intentions so that it will then translate into more sales.Nowadays, several big brands in Indonesia have used foreign celebrities as their brand ambassadors, especially by using Korean celebrities.For example, Lee Min Ho in Luwak White Coffee, Siwon in Mie Sedap, Blackpink to promote Shopee.This phenomenon is also followed by the local beauty industry.One of the best examples for this would be Scarlett, one of Indonesia's most popular beauty/skincare line, which collaborated with famous Korean actor Song Joong Ki on their body care product line.Somethinc had also come up with their own collaboration with not only one but two collaborations with Korean artists Han So Hee and NCT Dream for their skincare line.With so many K-drama and K-pop fans as beauty or skincare enthusiasts in Indonesia, as well as the trend of having beautiful and luminous skin in the likes of their Korean idols, having Korean celebrities as the "face" of the brand through making them brand ambassadors has nowadays been a common practice.This phenomenon could affect brands in marketing their products, whether Korean celebrities have major impact or not in customer purchase intention and how they could affect non-korean fans to purchase products with Korean celebrities as brand ambassadors.However, some previous studies have not sufficiently explored the impact of the cause fit of the celebrities to the purchase in Indonesia's Beauty Industry / 115 -124 intentions.Therefore this research paper aims to find the effects of Korean celebrities as brand ambassadors in Indonesia's beauty industry especially for Millennials and Gen Z 's purchase intention.Based on articles written in the news column of University of Arkansas, a study done by Hayley Cocker and Emma Banister in 2013 who both are researchers in London found consumers aged 18 -24 heavily using celebrities in creating and developing their identities, an example is their appearance might copy the celebrities they follow.Thus, this research paper aims to answers following

Figure 1
Figure 1 Tested model corresponding variables as identified and then Bartlett's Test of Sphericity Also used to determine sampling adequacy with a p-value lower than 0.05(Malhotra, 2020).The findings shown in this study was 0.911 for the the KMO score and 4016.37 for Bartlett's test, with a significance level at 0.00 which mean the p-value is still fewer than 0.05.The result showed that the sample was sufficient for running factor analysis.This study also used factor loading to evaluate convergent validity, and the threshold for identifying significant factor loadings was set at 0.5.Main attributes for purchase intention in thisstudy consisted of four factors.The factor loadings value was relatively high, ranging between 0.553 to 0.839.All The \ factors scores exceeded the minimum acceptable measure which is 0.5.Next is to measure the attributes reliability, Cronbach's alpha was used in this research to determine the internal consistency of the items, it was ranging from 0.741 to 0.930, which was more than 0.70 as the threshold(Lin et al. 2020).
two or more independent variables, multicollinearity exists.Tolerance and the variance inflation factor (VIF) are the two most frequently used measures to assess multicollinearity(Oke et al., 2019).The acceptable range of tolerance values were 0.1-1.0.In this study, every tolerance value falls between 0.890 to 0.962, which is still within the acceptable range The VIF is a second measure of multicollinearity.A VIF below 3.0 indicates that no multicollinearity problem exists(Istijanto, 2021).The VIF statistics in this study ranges from 1.039-1.123,less than 3.0 as the cut-off point.As a result, It was shown that there were no issues with multicollinearity in this research.Because all of the variables were measured using the same scale, standardized regression weights were used to estimate the parameters in this research.T-values for connectedness and cause-fit toward purchase intention were found to be statistically significant ( p <0.05) which can be found on Table5.The result found in this study was adjusted R square of 0.527, therefore the prediction model was significant, which mean the Connectedness towards celebrities, attitude towards celebrities, and celebrities cause-fit, can explain 52.7% of the total variance of the dependent variable, i.e.Purchase intentions.
-fit between the celebrities and endorsed products, to support marketing activities in the promotion of a product, has been the object of study for decades.Using theory of parasocial relationships to explain connectedness toward celebrities and attitude toward celebrities; and theory congruence for cause-fit celebrities and endorsed products past researches(Kowert   and Daniel Jr., 2021;Wahyuni, Adi and Afif, 2022) revealed that independent variables in this research have positive relationship toward purchase intention.In addition to that, Wang and Centeno (2020) concluded that local or domestic celebrities are more effective than foreign celebrities.However, as the phenomenon in Indonesia's local cosmetic brands using Korean celebrities as their brand ambassador has been surging in the past years, has shown that the results of previous research are not in line with what marketers do to carry out their marketing activities.With the shifting of the marketing practices in Indonesia, hypotheses have been proposed for this research.Conclusion This research suggested that connectedness toward Korean celebrities has more impact on consumers' purchase intentions than the other variables While the relationship between congruence of Korean celebrities and cosmetic products endorsed also have a considerable impact on consumers' purchase intentions.Attitude towards celebrities has no remarkable impact on purchase intention which suggest that it occur due to difference of social and cultural nearness because of the origin of the celebrities.Connectedness toward celebrities influences consumers' purchase intention to show their devotion to the celebrities.Whereas for celebrities causefit, it is verified that congruence between celebrities and endorsed products have a favorable impact on consumers' purchase intentions.Attractive celebrities may enhance consumers' attitude towards the brand itself, thus resulting in a positive impact to consumers' purchase intention.Further research is needed to explore other kinds of products and generations to further understand the phenomenon such as non-cosmetic products may have different directions of impact

Figure 2
Figure 2 Results of the tested model

Table 3 KMO and Bartlett's test Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy Bartlett's Test of Sphericity
Source : Processed primary data, 2022

Table 4 Measurement of Scale and Their Validity & Reliability
Source : Processed primary data, 2022 Source : Processed primary data, 2022