Fictional marketing example

Social media and purchase intention thesis example

This walkthrough follows a fictional master's student who wants to study influencer marketing. It shows how a broad topic becomes a focused, measurable thesis plan.

Project snapshot

The student starts with the topic "social media influencers and consumer behaviour". That is interesting, but it is too wide to guide a thesis. It could cover platform algorithms, parasocial relationships, brand trust, celebrity culture, advertising disclosure, or many other fields. The first task is to choose one specific decision problem and make the study feasible within one semester.

Programme areaMarketing management

Possible populationDutch consumers aged 18 to 30

Likely designOnline survey or simple experiment

Main outputProposal, literature review, methodology, analysis plan

The chosen problem is practical: brands often pay influencers to promote sustainable or lifestyle products, but students cannot assume that follower count alone explains purchase intention. The thesis needs a sharper construct, such as perceived credibility, and a clear outcome, such as intention to buy after seeing a sponsored post.

Bad-to-better research question

Too broad: How does social media affect consumers?

This version names a channel but not a population, product category, construct, outcome, or evidence type. It would be hard to decide which literature belongs in the review.

Better: To what extent does perceived influencer credibility affect purchase intention for sustainable fashion products among Dutch consumers aged 18 to 30?

The better version names the predictor, outcome, product context, and population. It also suggests a quantitative design because the wording asks about the extent of an effect. A supervisor might still ask whether the student can claim "affect" with a cross-sectional survey. If not, the wording could become "is associated with" or the design could become an experiment with controlled post examples.

Proposal outline

Section	What this fictional proposal would need to prove
Background	Influencer marketing is widely used in fashion promotion, and credibility is a plausible factor in how sponsored posts are received.
Problem	Brands may select influencers by visibility, while the thesis focuses on whether perceived credibility matters for intention to buy.
Research question	The question connects credibility, purchase intention, sustainable fashion, and a defined consumer group.
Method	The proposal should explain whether the student will use survey measures, an experimental post stimulus, or both.
Feasibility	The student needs realistic access to respondents and enough time to pilot the survey wording.

Methodology choice

A simple survey could ask participants to rate an influencer's credibility and their purchase intention after viewing a post. That is feasible, but it has a limit: people who already like the influencer may also report higher intention, so the design cannot easily separate cause from existing preference. A small experiment can improve the logic by showing participants different versions of a post, for example high-credibility versus low-credibility cues, while keeping the product similar.

The beginner-friendly choice is a two-condition online experiment with random assignment. Each participant sees one fictional sponsored post for a sustainable fashion product. The student then measures perceived credibility, purchase intention, and control variables such as prior interest in sustainable fashion. The analysis could compare purchase intention between conditions and test whether credibility scores relate to the outcome.

Literature review plan

The literature review should not become a long history of social media. It should build the argument needed by the question. The first block can define influencer credibility, often broken into expertise, trustworthiness, and attractiveness. The second block can explain purchase intention as a marketing outcome. The third block should connect those constructs in sponsored content or sustainable fashion settings.

Construct map

Predictor: perceived influencer credibility.
Outcome: purchase intention.
Context: sustainable fashion posts.
Possible controls: product involvement and sustainability interest.

Evidence gap

The student should show what is already known about credibility and what remains unclear for the chosen product context and age group. The gap must be narrower than "not enough research exists".

Timeline and risks

Week 1

Confirm research question, product context, and supervisor expectations.

Week 2

Build the literature matrix and choose credible measurement scales.

Week 3

Draft the survey and create the fictional sponsored post stimuli.

Week 4

Pilot the wording with a small group and revise confusing items.

Weeks 5 to 6

Collect responses, clean the data, and document exclusions.

Weeks 7 to 8

Run analysis, write results, and connect findings back to the literature.

The main risk is overclaiming causality. If the study uses a survey only, the thesis should be cautious about "affects". If it uses an experiment, the stimulus must be clear enough that the conditions differ in credibility cues without changing too many other things at once.

Student checklist for this example

The research question names credibility, purchase intention, product context, and population.
The method matches the strength of the claim in the question.
The literature review is organised around constructs, not platform history.
The survey or stimulus wording can be piloted before full data collection.
The analysis plan is realistic for the student's statistics level.
The final thesis avoids claiming more than the data can support.

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Scitong helps you capture the topic, research question, constructs, method choices, evidence gaps, and stage checklist before you write the full thesis.

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