IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ids/ijimad/v22y2025i4p388-407.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

KOC's characteristics, KOC effectiveness and online customer engagement towards travel products: evidence from Vietnam

Author

Listed:
  • Thu-Hang Hoang
  • Hong-Diem Le
  • Trieu-Chau Ngo
  • Minh A.B. Nguyen

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated unprecedented technology access, especially in the tourism field when people are restricted to travel based on several lock-down regulations. This has progressively generated favourable conditions for the rise of key opinion consumer (KOCs) on multiple social media channels. However, KOC is still a novel concept that is underexplored by past literature. The objective of this study is to investigate some distinctive KOC's characteristics including five elements (expertise, trustworthiness, usage similarity, source dynamism and cognitive effort) with the moderating role of product - KOC alignment that impact online customer engagement when interacting with travel-related marketing content on various social media platforms. The research adopted the PLS-SEM technique in the data analysis gained from 350 young consumers in Vietnam. The results of this paper propose the foundation for catering more effective strategies to reach higher levels of customer engagement via the use of suitable KOCs' profiles and relevant choice of travel products.

Suggested Citation

  • Thu-Hang Hoang & Hong-Diem Le & Trieu-Chau Ngo & Minh A.B. Nguyen, 2025. "KOC's characteristics, KOC effectiveness and online customer engagement towards travel products: evidence from Vietnam," International Journal of Internet Marketing and Advertising, Inderscience Enterprises Ltd, vol. 22(4), pages 388-407.
    • Handle: RePEc:ids:ijimad:v:22:y:2025:i:4:p:388-407
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.inderscience.com/link.php?id=146486
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ids:ijimad:v:22:y:2025:i:4:p:388-407. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sarah Parker (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.inderscience.com/browse/index.php?journalID=84 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.