A moderated mediation model of the relationship among digital marketing campaigns, brand recall, purchase intention, and purchase decision

Type of the article: Research ArticleAbstractUnderstanding how digital marketing campaigns translate into online purchase decisions remains a critical issue in rapidly growing e-commerce markets. This study explores how digital marketing campaigns translate into online purchase decision by testing a moderated mediation model in which purchase intention serves as a mediator and brand recall functions as a moderator in e-commerce. A two-wave survey design was employed, with data collected at two different time points separated by a time interval, in order to mitigate common method bias and strengthen causal inference. A two-wave survey was conducted among 297 online consumers aged 18 years and above who had prior experience with major e-commerce platforms in Vietnam. Data were collected via structured online questionnaires using a convenience sampling approach and analyzed with R statistical packages to test the proposed relationships. The empirical results indicate that digital marketing campaigns have a significant positive effect on purchase decisions, with purchase intention serving as a key mediating mechanism (β = 0.120, 95% CI 0.058, 0.195, p = 0.001). Besides, the total effect of digital marketing campaigns on purchase decisions was found to be significant (β = 0.485, 95% CI 0.384, 0.596, p lt; 0.001). The moderated mediation analysis further shows that the indirect effect remains positive across levels of brand recall but is strongest and statistically significant at low levels of brand recall, while gradually weakening and becoming statistically insignificant at higher levels, declining from 0.090 at −2 SD to 0.020 at +2 SD. These findings suggest that when brand recall is low, consumers are more likely to rely on central-route processing, whereby purchase intention plays a pivotal role in translating digital marketing exposure into purchase decisions. As brand recall increases, the influence of this intention-based pathway diminishes. By identifying low brand recall as a boundary condition of central-route persuasion within the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), this study clarifies how digital marketing effectiveness varies across consumer cognitive states and provides differentiated strategic implications for emerging versus well-established brands in e-commerce contexts.