MEDIATING ROLE OF CONSUMER INVOLVEMENT IN THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MARKETING STIMULI AND CONSUMER PURCHASE BEHAVIOR

This study has applied the claims of the S-O-R model regarding consumer purchase behavior and investigates the impact of marketing stimuli on the purchase behavior of Smartphone users. To add value to the concept; researchers have conceptualized consumer involvement as a mediator in the relationship between marketing stimuli and consumer purchase behavior. Marketing stimuli are external marketing components and include factors such as product characteristics, pricing, processes, personnel, tangible evidence, and promotion. In this connection, a quantitative and deductive approach has been employed to conduct cross-sectional primary data. To underline the phenomenon, a sample of 425 smartphone users has responded through a self-administered questionnaire. Based on theory and prior literature, hypotheses are generated in order to test through AMOS. In this regard, a measurement model was established while setting all the thresholds of the model. Finally, a structural model was then tested with the aim to test the hypotheses. The findings of the study revealed that marketing stimuli have a positive impact on both consumer involvement and purchase behavior. Whereas consumer involvement does mediate the relationship between marketing stimuli and consumer purchase behavior. This research provides a deep insight into the use of marketing stimuli in studying consumers’ purchase behavior. Further research can be conducted by observing the impact of various social-culture aspects on customer behavior, also, different marketing factors, such as promotion, people, venue, and procedures, could be used as dimensions of marketing stimuli to increase the study's exposure and yield diverse outcomes.


INTRODUCTION
We live in a technologically driven society in which cellphones are shrinking and their use is increasing by the day. Smart phone use has skyrocketed over the last decade, not only allowing users to enjoy this incredible product, but also allowing firms to thrive in the mobile phone manufacturing industry. To be competent in the smart phone industry, one must understand the aspects of the marketing mix and their impact on customer purchase behaviour. The impact of marketing stimuli on consumer purchasing behaviour is examined in this study, with customer involvement treated as a mediating variable utilizing the Stimulus-Organism-Response (SOR) Model. The features such as display, processor, battery, 5G connectivity, camera, and memory are among the characteristics of smartphones. Additionally, Email, location tracking, digital content, television, music, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, documentation system, social networks, dictionary, encyclopedia, and many more technologies are combined in smart phones. These technologies combine to provide a critical helpful device that may be used as a personal assistant or to handle massive business transactions with a single click (Simplice Asongu, 2015). Customers' reliance on smartphones has grown significantly, prompting researchers to investigate the factors that drive consumers to acquire smartphones. Marketing mix elements are the most important of these factors to investigate and are taken into account in this study.
The rise in smartphone usage is opening up new chances for manufacturers and entrepreneurs to launch profitable ventures in the mobile phone manufacturing industry (Antonio Ghezzi, Raffaello Balocco, & Andrea Rangone, 2016). All successful businesses get a competitive advantage by building an appropriate marketing mix for their products. In this study the researcher has taken certain smartphone features (see table 1) and have considered these features as marketing mix inputs. These features are taken under consideration as these are the most important inputs to be studied and play a vital role in enhancing mobile phones value amongst its users (Park & Moon,204 2013). For brand name, it is the most crucial element for the product (Li, 2014). Price is also an important factor that has great influence on consumer's purchase decision. Consumers have high preferences for the smartphone that helps them giving highest acceptance in society.
Smartphones help people to establish their social circle and making their social life better as it is the way to interact with people and it has a great influence on people's lives. Purchase of smartphone is just like purchasing of power amongst young adults (Wang, 2017). It gives social acceptance in the society and people feel more satisfied while using popular brands as these brands fulfill their need of belonging.
Previous studies were based on existed and tested models under different considerations, in this study the relationships are measured through SOR Model (a novel approach) as this model is helpful in depicting the effects of stimuli on consumer's response. Hence, the questions posed in this study are to find out the impact of marketing stimuli on consumer's purchase behavior and to establish the mediating role of consumer's involvement between the marketing stimuli and consumer's purchase behavior.

Marketing Stimuli
Marketing stimuli are external marketing components that have a triggering and motivating effect on customer purchasing behaviour. These external marketing factors include all product characteristics, pricing, processes, personnel, tangible evidence, and promotion. Marketing stimulus is one of the most important things to consider while observing consumer behaviour.
Understanding the SOR Model is the first step in understanding consumer behaviour.
Marketing and social-psychological cues infiltrate the minds of consumers. These elements influence and inspire a person to make a purchase or avoid a particular product (Helm & Gritsch, 2014). When the four aspects are combined, they form marketing stimuli, which are also known as marketing mix elements. Marketing stimulus can be intrapersonal (inside people) or extra personal (within people) (between people).
Businesses plan and develop marketing stimuli, whereas psychological, social, and cultural variables create environmental stimuli (Sammy, Robinson, & Oriade, 2018). Marketers must be aware of their buyers' perceptions of certain products, as customer attributes, perceptions, and interests all have a significant role in their purchasing behaviour. Marketers must understand their customers' wants as well as how their product will generate buzz in the market.
The current study focuses on the mobile phone sector and highlights the most critical characteristics that will be measured as marking stimulus.

Product Features
Product features are product attributes that help to attract most customers and satisfy their requirements and demands, giving them a sense of belonging by owning that product (Kekolahti, Kilkki, Hämmäinen, & Riikonen, 2016). Product features or attributes are critical in acquiring a good value market for that specific product. Marketers are expected to highlight product attributes while selling their items in order to create a sense of benefits associated with that specific product. Product features are the first and most important aspects in product creation that distinguish the product from its competitors, making it unique and valuable. The first step in developing and producing a product is to design its features, which include the Build, Network, Processor, Display, Memory, Camera, Connectivity, Sensors, Games, Battery, and Price. The attributes of a product can either lead to its success or lead to its demise (Liu, Cheng, & Ma, 2016). Adding more and features to a product is the same as providing more benefits to clients and providing bundles of developments linked to a single product (Kang & Zhou, 2017).
Smartphones contain a plethora of capabilities, many of which are advanced in nature and are becoming more advanced, complex, and useful by the day. Mobile phones also have higher resolution screens, a location tracker, a documentation system, multimedia, video and sound playing systems, global positioning systems, and video editors (Gordon, Al Zidjaly, & Tovares, 2017).

Brand Name
The brand name is a significant factor in the success and competitiveness of a new product (Rubio, Villaseor, & Yagüe, 2017). A brand is a unique name that is used to trade a product into the market. In Pakistan, the majority of users use practically all world-class brands such as Samsung, iPhones, Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi, and Realme mobile phones. According to a recent poll, Apple has become the world's first $ 3 trillion firm, as iPhones bring in record revenue (Verma, 2022). It has the most customers globally and is the most utilised brand on the planet because it distinguishes itself from all other Android phones by providing the latest interface system, different software upgrades at different price points, different types of users all over the world, and the greatest camera. The top ten brands in the world are shown below (Skool, 2021).

Consumer Involvement
Consumer involvement is described as a state of mind that causes customers to perceive a product/service and make a buying decision (Joshi & Rahman, 2017). Involvement can be viewed as a motivating factor that has a significant impact on customer purchases and relationships (Srihadi & Setiawan, 2015). Involvement has been defined as a consumer's reaction to a specific product, message, or scenario. Involvement is the response elicited by external elements such as environmental factors, economic reasons, product qualities, social acceptance, and personal liking for the product. Involvement can be defined as a personal factor in a person that drives, provokes, or creates interest in a specific product or feature. Researchers agree on the importance of consumer involvement as a moderating component in consumer behaviour studies (Kautsar, Widianto, Abdulah, & Amalia, 2012).

Purchase Behavior
A consumer's purchase behaviour relates to the actual actions taken when purchasing a specific product. Purchase behaviour can be influenced by previous experience, positive word of mouth, advertisements, loyalty, or a specific association with a brand or product that activates or motivates the buyer to make a specific purchase. Consumer buying behaviour can be tough to assess at times since their individual mind set causes them to react and behave in certain ways.
Consumers are also heavily involved in rational thinking and other cognitive processes prior to making a purchase. It is a very cautious step to take for consumer's actual buying behaviour wants because it includes their monetary assets.
Consumers are much more interested in mobile phone purchases as smartphones have become a part of our lives, however before making any buy, they strive to gather all of the information about the brand, product, price, and perks that they will experience after making the final purchase. External factors have a lot of influence on consumer purchase behaviour, but internal factors, such as personal liking or disliking of a specific product, interest in that product, and level of perceived satisfaction with the product, also play an important role in making a purchase, which is consumer involvement. The impact of external factors, marketing stimulation, and internal factors, consumer involvement, on consumer purchasing behaviour will be examined in this study.

Theory Support
SOR model is one of the most significant models for measuring the impact of external and internal factors on consumer behaviour. According to the paradigm, people's reactions to a given scenario follow three key steps: external stimuli, emotional state, and behavioural response (Ul Islam & Rahman, 2017). Stimulus refers to external or environmental elements, whilst Organism refers to the consumers' inner viewpoints from both emotional and cognitive thinking, and Response refers to the consumers' actual conduct in response to a given scenario created by Stimulus and Organism. The SOR Model assumes that external factors, referred to as Stimulus, influence consumers' inner states, motivate their minds, referred to as Organism, and cause them to take specific behavioural responses, referred to as Response, in response to a given scenario (Gallé, Lautner, Flexas, & Fromm, 2015).
The SOR Model is an approach that describes different stages of involvements. Stimuli is referred to as external involvement in this approach because it includes external factors, environmental or social, that have some influence on an individual's inner state, whereas Organism refers to an individual's inner state and internal involvement, and the third involvement is response oriented, which has been caused by the impact of stimuli and organism (Vieira, 2013).

Involvement in a Situation (Stimuli)
A stimulus is defined as any external force, which might be environmental or social, that persuades or influences an individual to think intellectually or emotionally about a situation and then respond accordingly (Wang, Jin, Zhu, & Yan, 2017).
This category in the context of consumer behaviour can be seen in a specific situation where product characteristics of a product such as cost of a product, complexity in using that product, time consumption in using that product, poor execution of the certain product or excellent performance of product all contribute directly to situational involvement and these factors will make a consumer consider purchasing a certain product in the future (Machado et al., 2017).
Another source of stimuli that might influence situational participation is the presence of a social-psychological milieu surrounding a certain product, the purchase of that product, and the consumer himself (Anderson, Folk, & Courtney, 2016).

Persevering Involvement (Organism)
In the SOR Model, an organism represents an individual's inner state and mind, his viewpoints, ideas, and personal sense of belonging in relation to a certain circumstance or experience (Abdullah, Jayaraman, & Kamal, 2016). In the context of a purchasing procedure, organism can be defined as a consumer's personal likeness or dislike of a specific product, or his own perspectives that motivate him to obtain a specific product, or his previous experience.
Enduring participation is based on two fundamental variables. The first is an individual's experience or previous exposure to a given product or circumstance (Urban, 2014).

Response in Involvement (Response)
Most complicated behavioural and cognitive processes that include the overall consumer decision process elicit response participation. The most significant components in the customer purchasing process are believed to be research, looking for accurate information, choice making, acquisition, and post-purchase decision making (Davvetas & Diamantopoulos, 2020). Based on the above theoretical framework, the researcher has established the following hypotheses for the present study. H1: Marketing stimuli has significant impact of on consumer purchase behavior.

Consumer reaction involvement is
H2: Marketing stimulus has significant impact of on consumer's involvement.
H3: Consumer's involvement has significant impact on consumer purchase behavior.
H4: Consumer involvement mediated the relationship between marketing stimuli and consumer purchase behavior significantly.

Research Design
The present study is based on quantitative and deductive approach. The data was collected from 425 individuals in one shot.

Instrument
The instrument utilized for the collection of data is a structured questionnaire that contained structured and close-ended questions. All questions in the questionnaire were adopted from previous studies. A five-point Likert scale is used with a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree).

Respondents
In business research, there are three types of units of analysis i.e., individual, a group and an organization. The unit of analysis for this study is individual which includes the smartphone users located at district Peshawar which is the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Assumptions of Multivariate Analysis
Prior to in-depth analysis, the data was examined for multivariate analysis assumptions such as normality, missing values, outliers, and multicollinearity. To confirm the normality of the data, QQ plots of all variables were created and found to be normally distributed. Furthermore, all items on the scale were assessed thoroughly for Skewness and Kurtosis and determined to be within the permissible ranges of -1 to +1 and -2 to +2. A careful study of frequencies and the plot box approach were used to evaluate the outliers in order to determine whether the data set was free of outliers. A few cases with extreme outliers were eliminated from the data. There were no missing values in the valid responses overall.
Correlation has been used to test the constructions' multicollinearity. The level of association between constructs is determined by the correlation values. A correlation coefficient of 0.1 indicates a little correlation, 0.3 indicates a medium correlation, and 0.5 indicates a significant correlation.  Table 2 shows the correlation between variables, correlations help to identify that whether there is any significant relationship between variables or not. As it can be seen in the Table 2

Reliability and Uni-dimensionality
The validation of the items of each latent variable is a mandatory step before analyzing the path model of the study. Ping (2004) stated that the items should always be unidimensional.
Measures should be shown to be unidimensional (having one underlying construct), consistent, reliable (comparatively free of measurement error), and valid (measuring what they should).
To check for reliability Cronbach alpha was used (see values) and to establish and assess for uni-dimensionality, we subjected the data to Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) using AMOS 20.0. To perform CFA a path diagram is necessary to be constructed whether the CFA is being done for individual construct or the nested model. Results of the CFA using the sample covariance matrix as an input, confirmed that each indicator loaded significantly on its respective underlying concept. Reliability of the constructs was assessed through Cronbach alpha. The results as reported in Table 4 show that the Cronbach alpha values and minimum and maximum values of loadings.

Figure 2. Nested CFA of Constructs
The degree to which multiple attempts to measure the same idea agree is referred to as convergent validity. Two methodologies are used to assess convergent validity. The first method for determining convergent validity, as proposed by (Ahire, Golhar, & Waller, 1996), is to compute the Bentler-Bonett Normed Fit Index (NFI). The NFI values of all variables were determined to be more than 0.90. According to the second approach, the variables should have large factor loadings on their respective latent relationships (Sila & Ebrahimpour, 2005). The factor loading of all latent variables with their constructs spans from 0.55 to 0.88, which is greater than the permissible range of 0.5.  Table 5 shows the indicators, the χ 2 of the construct before modifications was 92.32, degree of freedom 11, the ration of χ 2 and degree of freedom was 8.40, Goodness of fit index is 0.94, Normed fit index 0.92, CFI is 0.92 and RMSEA is 0.10 that is less than 0.5, after modification the χ 2= 16.80, ratio of χ 2 and degree of freedom is 1.97, GFI is 0.97, NFI 0.97, CFI is 0.98 and the value of RMSEA is 0.05.

Direct and Indirect Effects
To test the hypothesis, the researcher fitted two structural models (direct and indirect effect models). Several goodness-of-fit indices, such as 2 / df; GFI, NFI, CFI, and RMSEA, were employed to evaluate the fit of the two structural models, as proposed in the SEM literature (Bentler, 1992;Hu & Bentler, 1999;Marsh, Balla, & McDonald, 1988;Ping, 2004;Sila & Ebrahimpour, 2005;Venkatraman, 1989). We computed the direct path from MS to PB and CI to PB using the direct-effect approach. There is no path from MS to CI in this scenario (mediator variable). The path has been connected between MS and CI in an indirect model; this approach was adapted from the study of Shrout and Bolger, (2002) in order to test mediation in CB-SEM.

H1
Marketing stimuli has significant positive impact of on purchase behavior Accepted

H2
Marketing stimulus has significant positive impact of on consumer involvement Accepted H3 Consumer involvement has significant positive impact on Purchase behavior Accepted

H4
The relationship between marketing stimuli and purchase behavior is mediated by consumer involvement

DISCUSSION
The study was carried out to comprehend the marketing mix elements and their significance in the context of smart phone buying behaviour, while customer involvement was taken into account to highlight and learn the function of individual inner state of mind and how it affects purchase behaviour.
This study was conducted utilizing the S-O-R model, which has been widely utilized by researchers to analyze consumer behaviour in order to contribute to marketing businesses as well as academia. To carry out this study, a sample of 425 smartphone users from the district of Peshawar was collected using instrument surveys.
According to the findings of this study, marketing stimuli have a beneficial effect on both consumer involvement and consumer purchase behaviour, whereas consumer involvement mediates the relationship between marketing stimuli and consumer buy behaviour. H1: Marketing stimuli have a considerable impact on purchase behaviour, indicating a direct relationship between marketing stimuli and purchase behaviour, was acknowledged and demonstrated that marketing stimuli have a strong impact on consumer buy behaviour among mobile phone users in Pakistan. The second hypothesis, H2; Marketing stimuli have a significant impact on consumer involvement, was likewise accepted, suggesting that marketing stimuli have a direct impact on customer involvement. H3 is the third hypothesis, and it states that consumer involvement has a substantial impact on purchase behaviour. This hypothesis investigated the relationship or impact of customer involvement on mobile phone buying behaviour. This hypothesis was accepted in the current study, which demonstrates the significance of customer beliefs and perceptions, as well as the extent to which they influence consumer buying behaviour. Fourth hypothesis H4: Consumer participation mediates the relationship between marketing stimuli and purchasing behaviour. This hypothesis observed the mediating role of consumer involvement between marketing stimuli and consumer purchase behaviour, and it was also accepted in the current study, which concluded that consumer involvement has a significant mediating effect on marketing stimuli and consumer purchase behaviour. This study will also help academics by guiding researchers to learn about marketing stimuli and their impact on consumer purchase behaviour and consumer involvement in relation to the S-O-R model, so that they can test the study with different variables in different situations and with different populations.

FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS
The study was conducted among the users of smartphone, and data was only obtained from one district of KP, Pakistan. Future research can be conducted with a different population and under other conditions to get different conclusions. This study concentrated on marketing elements such as product attributes, price, and brand name. Further research can be conducted by observing the impact of various social-culture aspects on customer behaviour. In the future, different marketing factors, such as promotion, people, venue, and procedures, could be used as dimensions of marketing stimuli to increase the study's exposure and yield diverse outcomes.