Exploring the Factors Driving Impulse Buying Tendency on Advertisements of Facebook: A Social Learning Theory Perspective

Nowadays, advertising on Facebook has grown into a highly popular marketing channel, resulting in how advertisements can capture users' attention becomes a vital issue for practitioners and researchers. This study aims to use the Social Learning Theory as a theoretical foundation to investigate how the social-feature factor, perceived herd behavior on Facebook advertisement, may serve as the external observational learning sources and how personal instant gratification need learned from impulse consumption may serve as the internal reinforcement learning sources. Moreover, how both learning sources tempt consumers' impulse buying tendency was also examined. The results showed that the numbers of "Like," "Share," and "Comment" on the advertisement of Facebook might become an effective observational learning source that triggers users to follow and imitate others' advertisement viewing behaviors. The results also indicated that instant gratification feeling learned from previous impulse buying can be a reinforcement learning source that becomes a durational inner stimulus of impulsive consumption. Moreover, this study further revealed that both perceived herd behavior and instant gratification would lead users to generate reactions of perceived usefulness and perceived enjoyment toward advertisements on Facebook News Feed, which in turn intensify their impulse buying tendency. Notably, both perceived herd behavior and instant gratification have greater influences on perceived usefulness than on perceived enjoyment, and perceived usefulness also has a greater influence on impulse buying tendency. Finally, the implications of the results were discussed.