Current Issue

Certification Meets Content: How Perceived Brand Certification and Social Media Marketing Interact to Shape Purchase Intention

Chien-Ting Chiang*

Yun Wang

Kai-Feng Hsueh

Ying Chieh Chen

*Corresponding author: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Abstract

Despite sustained scholarly interest in sustainable agricultural marketing, the mechanisms through which product certification signals and social media community engagement jointly shape consumer satisfaction and downstream behavioral intentions in experiential farmers' market settings remain poorly understood. Drawing on Social Identity Theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979), this study proposes and empirically tests an integrative model in which social media marketing experience and perceived product certification converge as antecedent drivers of customer satisfaction, which in turn fosters word-of-mouth recommendations and revisit intentions. Survey data were collected from 215 verified attendees of the Shennong Market — a government-facilitated, certified farmers' market in Kaohsiung, Taiwan — and analyzed via structural equation modeling (SPSS 26.0; AMOS 18.0). Results indicate that both social media marketing experience and product certification positively predict customer satisfaction, which fully mediates their effects on consumers' post-visit behavioral intentions. Critically, the effect of social media marketing experience on satisfaction substantially exceeds that of certification alone, underscoring the primacy of community-embedded digital engagement in this context. Theoretically, the findings extend Social Identity Theory to the sustainable agri-food domain by demonstrating how certification credibility and participatory digital engagement jointly reinforce consumers' collective market identification and satisfaction. Practically, the study equips farmers' market operators with evidence-based guidance on how to strategically balance digital community cultivation with transparent certification communication to maximize consumer loyalty and sustain pro-environmental purchase behavior.

Keywords: certification signals; customer satisfaction; farmers' market; post-purchase intentions; social identity theory; social media marketing