Digital and Social Media Marketing

Social media facilitates and enhances communication between businesses and customers. Nowadays, although it is commonly recognised that companies implement social media into their marketing activities, it is also acknowledged that companies struggle to calculate the return on investment (ROI) from social media marketing efforts as most of them focus only on certain tangible outcomes such as the impact on sales and purchases. Attempts have been made by researchers to identify how to measure key impacts of social media in relation to marketing; however, there remains a lack of empirical data and no comprehensive overview of what “ROI” can mean for an organisation seeking returns on their social media adoption. By knowing how to measure ROI from social media, companies can produce valuable insights which can help enhance marketing strategies in promoting their products/services. Thus, the aim of this chapter is to provide a review of ROI in social media marketing with a particular focus on intangible outcomes such as brand awareness, customer engagement/relationship and eWOM.

The aim of this study is to identify (1) the key elements and consequences of fashion e-blogs and (2) what effects fashion e-blogs have on women’s intention to use them. There is a large body of research in domains ranging from e-blogs, perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness and intention to use. The significance of this research is that even though the social media, e-WOM and e-blogs are becoming normal ways to communicate, the effects and influence of them on businesses are limited. Data were gathered from women who interacted in five e-blogs. This chapter contributes to the growing literature on e-blog brands. This study samples a significant segment of fashion blogging consumers. Key implications for managers and researchers are highlighted.

Social media commerce has been one of the fastest-growing areas over recent years. However, only a limited number of studies have addressed the related issues of social media commerce. It was also noticed that extant literature did not explore or link the impact of social commerce constructs on social trust and how this could impact the customer value co-creation. Hence, the current research aims to identify this gap and to propose a conceptual framework that highlights the linkage between social commerce constructs, social trust, and customer value co-creation. In line with this, a number of exploratory interviews were conducted to gain further understanding about how the customer’s perception of customer value co-creation and social trust could be affected by the role of social commerce. Accordingly, the current model proposes that social commerce constructs (second-order; ratings and reviews, recommendations and referrals, and forums and communities) impact social trust, which in turn affects customer value co-creation dimensions (functional value, hedonic value, and social value) in social network sites (SNSs). Theoretical and practical implications are provided.

This study aims to explore whether Saudi customers’ intention and adoption of social commerce differ according to their demographic characteristics. Four demographic factors, namely age, gender, education, and customer’s experience with social media, have been examined in this present study. The data was collected from a field survey questionnaire administered to a convenience sample of Saudi customers. The main statistical results (mean and standard deviation) reveal that Saudi customers’ intention and adoption of social commerce are likely to differ due to customers’ demographic differences. The results indicate that Saudi customers’ behavioural intention towards social commerce adoption would differ according to their age groups and experience with social media. Furthermore, Saudi customers’ behaviour towards social commerce adoption would differ according to their gender. However, the educational level does not affect Saudi customers’ behavioural intention and usage behaviour of social commerce adoption.

The proliferation of E-commerce sector has rapidly increased the number of online shoppers and e-retailers, thereby raising a need to study an online consumer. Increasing number of online shoppers, spurt in mobile penetration, secure payment gateways and improved logistics infrastructure are the key factors affecting the domestic online market. This study aims at developing an instrument to map the three major constructs—Consumer Brand Perception (CBP), Consumer Buying Behaviour (CBB) and Consumer Brand Relationship (CBR)—that impact the online consumer buying process. Many studies examined various factors affecting an online consumer in isolation, but an integrated approach of mapping CBP, CBB and CBR is what the authors found missing. With the help of the detailed literature review, the authors identified various parameters impacting these three constructs and have developed a research instrument to study the impact of CBP, CBR and CBB on online apparel shopping. This research study has various academic and managerial implications.

Major environmental issues are considered partly rooted in consumer overconsumption. Although pro-environmental behaviours (PEBs) have been examined extensively in developed Western countries, researchers recommend future studies to investigate consumers’ PEBs in developing countries. Responding to these calls, this research aims to contribute to the marketing literature from a non-Western perspective through a qualitative exploration of the concepts associated with consumers’ PEBs in Saudi Arabia. Analysis of 16 interviews revealed that a number of themes are connected with Saudi consumers’ PEBs including social media, perceived consumer effectiveness, universal eco-labelling, and price. The rich data provides a useful first glimpse to inform marketing strategies harnessing PEBs in developing countries and a starting point for further quantitative exploration.

Collaborative consumption (CC) has become a buzzword during the past few years. In fashion and apparel industry context, CC accentuates product usage rather than ownership, through sharing usage of underutilized or unwanted products by renting, swapping, trading, and lending. As the definition of CC suggests, the exchange of apparel is expected to happen between private individuals. However, the fashion and apparel retail industry is seeing a phenomenon where an increasing number of retailers are developing business models to provide a platform that facilitates renting or sharing of clothing items between consumers and/or the retailer. As this business is booming, it is becoming more important for retailers to understand apparel CC customer consumption behavior, what motivates customers to adopt such models, and more importantly what stops them from using such services. In this chapter, we are focusing on understanding what stops customers at collectivist cultures from using such services. We are focusing on materialism as a potential value that might hinder customer’s willingness to adopt CC.

Twitter is a microblogging service allowing users to post up to 280 characters at a time describing their thoughts. Twitter currently receives about 500 million tweets a day, in which people share their comments regarding a wide range of topics. In the process of creating social network profiles, users reveal a lot about themselves in what they share and how they say it. Through self-description, status update, and tweets, we can find a lot about the users. A user’s knowledge of social sites could be remarkably improved if other information like demographic attributes and user’s personal interest and the interest of other users are considered. This is truer in case of celebrity users. This chapter attempts to analyze celebrity tweets to provide relevant recommendations to the practitioners. The tweets of celebrity users are classified using two distinct approaches (1) Fixed Classification into six predefined categories and (2) Generating a category if the tweet does not belong to any defined category. The first kind of classification has been done in three different ways; by individually applying Naïve Bayes, Decision Tree, and Support Vector Machine. For generating a new category, Latent Dirichlet Allocation is used. Henceforth, this Persona Classification of Celebrity Twitter Users will help users to gain insight into their interests thereby decluttering their twitter feed and showing them relevant content on their feed. With the understanding of celebrity persona, smart recommendation systems can also be designed.

The advent of “sharing economy” has attracted a lot of attention among researchers and businesses, among which transportation services are leading. The present chapter compares two sharing economy platforms in transportation in India, Ola and Uber taxi services, in terms of customer experiences in service quality. It uses Twitter analytics for the same. Tweets were downloaded using Twitter API for both Ola and Uber and content analytical procedures were followed. SERVQUAL model is used as a guiding framework for analysis. The analysis indicates that reliability of service is the biggest need for customers of these services.

Personal data and information collected online by companies can be used to design and personalise advisements. This chapter extends existing research into the online behavioural advertising by proposing a model that incorporates artificial intelligence and machine learning into developing emotionally appealing advertisements. It is proposed that big data and consumer analytics collected through AI from different sources will be aggregated to have a better understanding of consumers as individuals. Personalised emotionally appealing advertisements will be created with this information and shared digitally using pragmatic advertising strategies. Theoretically, this chapter contributes towards the use of emerging technologies such as AI and Machine Learning for Digital Marketing, big data acquisition, management and analytics and its impact on advertising effectiveness. With customer analytics making up a more significant part of big data use in sales and marketing and GDPR ensures data are legitimately collected and processed, there are practical implications for Managers as well. Acknowledging that this is a conceptual model, the critical challenges are presented. This is open for future research and development both from academic, digital marketing practitioners and computer scientists.

We have recently witnessed a digital revolution, which, due to the advent of the Internet and the development of mobile devices, has changed the way the hotel product is promoted, sold and distributed. Mobile applications enable a greater proximity between the users and the hotel chains, since you can only access them if you have previously been a guest at the hotel. Efficient app management can improve user loyalty to the brand. Therefore, any digital strategy that is carried out should consider what factors to implement to optimize the positioning of apps in a highly competitive universe.

This project aims to make known what factors whether internal or external, should be implemented to gain visibility in apps stores. The outcome of this project is to suggest hotels (owners/developers) what features need to be implemented to improve their visibility and, at the same time, provide researchers with more information on a new subject.

With the rapid growth of digitalization and competition in every sector, it is important to go through a career choice process in a specific order for achieving a good career decision. As the building blocks of career choice start from choosing the career-specific course, it is important for individuals to choose the course wisely for enhancing the career path. With digitalization and the number of online courses available, it becomes really tough to differentiate a relevant career-focused course from a mediocre one. Additionally, as social media platforms of social interaction, communication, and marketing are growing, increasing numbers of educational businesses have already integrated or plan to integrate social media applications into their marketing plans to reach and attract future students, thus showing a shift from traditional ways of marketing. It is important for firms to keep track of the latest demand of consumers to stay ahead of the competition and provide value-laden career-specific courses. This chapter builds a conceptual model for exploring the factors affecting the choice of technical online courses related to career choices with the notion that the concepts of psychology, marketing, and technology if forged together can help to improve the rate of adoption of technology and in turn educational marketing.

This chapter introduces the female-relational-perspective as the missing link in the Internet of the Things in smart cities because humans are organized when they use the Internet of the Things. Humans are privately organized in single, nuclear, and extended families, at work in teams and in public transport as streams of people going in and out of the neighborhood. Secondly, this chapter introduces the concept of superdiversity and its consequences for smart cities. In particular attention is paid to cultural bias and all-inclusive multiculturalism in smart cities. This chapter also proposes new vignettes for marketing in smart cities in which the female-relational-perspective, superdiversity, noncultural bias, all-inclusive multiculturalism and Internet of the Things are combined.

Technology use, adoption and adaptation have been discussed extensively in existing scholarly works but scant consideration is given to technology adoption, adaptation and appropriation. This chapter endeavours to address this gap in the literature by conducting a critical review of the scholarly works to examine the underlying antecedents and discrete adaptation behaviour (the entirety of technology adoption, adaptation and appropriation). The findings of this review reveal that such entirety has the following key underlying joint attitudinal cognitive (perceived opportunity, perceived relative advantage, perceived social influence, perceived control) and affective (enjoyment, self-enhancement, threat, fear and trust) components as antecedents to interaction and leading to discrete adaptation and appropriation behaviour of exploration to maximise and exploitation to satisfice technology benefits on the one hand and exploration to revert from technology to complete abandoning of technology on the other. The conceptual underpinning presented and analysed in this chapter advances the scholarship of technology adoption, adaptation and appropriation in entirety and provides useful direction for future empirical research for both academics and practitioners.

Social media marketing is a relatively new phenomenon, but one that is becoming increasingly relevant as part of today’s organizations’ marketing strategy. As such, the number of publications dealing with this subject has been growing steadily. A lot more research is needed, but there is already a good basis. However, one area that has not received much attention yet, either from the academic or the business worlds, is its application to international markets. From a business perspective, the situation is similar and many brands that have social media marketing strategies in their domestic market have not embraced it for their regional markets yet. This chapter attempts to (1) highlight the potential that lies within international social media marketing, (2) describe the challenges that organizations can find in its application, and (3) to provide some guidance on areas global marketers would need to consider before embarking on a successful social media strategy for their international markets.

The Indian e-commerce growth story is very promising and estimated to reach market size of US $120 billion in 2020 (PWC, Evolution of e-commerce in India Creating the bricks behind the clicks, https://​www.​pwc.​in/​assets/​pdfs/​publications/​2014/​evolution-of-e-commerce-in-india.​pdf, 2018). The majority of the horizontal market players who are fighting out for their share of pie in the market are making huge losses in billions. However, a start-up named flintobox operating in niche market has reached profitability through multi-channel digital marketing strategy. This research employed case study methodology through combination of interview and unobtrusive protocol for data collection. The findings revealed that search engine marketing did not work for flintobox. Whereas, discovery platforms such as social media and native advertising platform reduced their bounce rate from 90% to 50% and increased the conversion rate from mere 0.5% to 2%. The search traffic drastically dropped from almost 80% in the start to just 2% with discovery platforms contributing to 98% of the traffic at present.

This chapter investigates the ways in which activists and corporations interact via social media, harnessing its power to take political stands and engage their stakeholders to create social change. The benefits and pitfalls involved with corporate political activism on social media and elsewhere are explained and examples given of successful political stands taken by companies such as Dick’s Sporting Goods, Nike, and SSGA. Cases of negative outcomes following a corporation taking a political stand are also explored through the example of Fox News and Amazon. The role of CEOs in crafting and managing corporate political stands is reviewed, as is the impact of CEOs’ personal political values on how corporations deal with the issue of social responsibility. Some practical steps corporations can take when crafting political responses and dealing with activists on social media are also provided.

It is widely accepted that localization is not simply a matter of translation. However, most advice on cultural adaptation focuses on country-level cultural differences, not on a given brand’s target audience. While slightly better than a one-size-fits-all approach to website translation, country-level localization might be leaving on the table additional opportunities to build trust, increase user satisfaction and acquire more customers. While nothing can replace user or market research, messaging and layout analysis can help form hypotheses for testing with target-audience representatives.

Intercultural interaction is riddled with challenges even during in-person encounters. When the physical playing field is removed, communication becomes all that more difficult, relying heavily on text and image. International ecommerce attempts to transcend this barrier, finding opportunity in online marketplaces. Without face-to-face interaction, localization efforts must be made in order to optimize the experience between virtual seller and buyer. With increased insight into the opportunity available for both buyer and seller in online marketplaces, the need to localize product feeds becomes apparent. As many international marketplaces exist today that facilitate the selling and buying of products across a multitude of verticals, studying how localization is currently implemented is useful to find areas of improvement based on theory that can be applied to a broad spectrum of product types and cultures. By detecting issues in looking at three of the largest, most successful online marketplaces, it can be inferred that there is a need for optimization on a larger scale. Determining best use of resources for these optimizations based on effort and impact is essential in answering the question of localization vs. standardization on a product level.

Despite trends in globalization and the emergence of a global consumer culture, brands recognize the necessity of localizing their marketing efforts to effectively reach a wider consumer base. This evolution has created tension between developing global branding strategies and the increasingly precise localization efforts to narrower marketing segments – Hyperlocalization. This chapter explores ways in which brands have misstepped in their hyperlocalization efforts, often at the expense of perceived brand authenticity. We suggest a more nuanced view of the concept of hyperlocalization that would allow brands to leverage their authenticity to compatible market segments in a more safe and effective manner.

The localization industry is one of the largest growing sectors globally. Internet traffic globally is increasing each year, and therefore localization is imperative to appeal to audiences across the globe. A strategy of English-only digital media is no longer appropriate when wanting to target global markets. Engaging a global audience on a cultural and linguistic level with many variants of localization available, deciding the best direction for a company can be very dependent on the sector and market in which it is based. A localization strategy of digital marketing material can be complicated when deciding what approach to take—especially in terms of the extent to which localization is undertaken. In B2B (business-to-business) marketing, especially in industrial metrology, a more centralized approach to localization of digital media can be favoured, whereas in B2C (business-to-consumer) a broader and more customized approach is undertaken, as these markets have a higher level of self-expression. The industrial metrology sector in particular, due to the nature of its market, can make localization strategies even more centralized with even less localization. Despite this, there are arguments to say that both the sectors would benefit from extensive localization especially when it comes to their website.

Neuromarketing is a newer marketing sphere that digs deeper than traditional marketing techniques. It is a combination of neuroscience and market research that aims to understand the consumer’s physiological response to stimuli like digital content. A multitude of techniques can be used, including Eye Tracking, EEG/fMRI, Galvanic Skin Response, and Face Emotion Analysis. Companies have started using these neuromarketing techniques to explore and test the response that their content receives before they share it with the world. In this age of mass-internet adoption, companies are automatically considered to have a global presence. As a result, these neuromarketing techniques may start to play an important role as companies look to localize their content. Testing proposed content before entering or releasing it in a new market helps mitigate issues of offending or confusing the consumer. This chapter aims to discuss why it is important and how it can be helpful to begin using neuromarketing techniques in the global digital marketing and localization industry.

Branding plays an important role in establishing a brand’s visibility and position in international markets. The brand’s voice is the foundation for establishing a relationship with an audience, and social media is a powerful tool in this process. The author examines social media marketing in the global marketplace through the lens of two dimensions of the Hofstede national culture model—individualism vs. collectivism, and masculinity vs. femininity—and posits that a careful blending of an understanding of cultural dimensions, content localization, and brand voice and consistency results in social media communication that connects emotionally with its intended audience, thereby building both relationships with consumers and brand loyalty.

Markteffect, a full-service market research company, investigated potential students’ orientation processes, how to increase current students’ happiness with their schools, and how schools can make fans and ambassadors of their current students and alumni. Multiple studies were conducted with research techniques like interviews, group discussions, and quantitative surveys among thousands of potential and current college and university students. Results show that current students’ experiences are especially important in potential students’ orientation processes and that social media can play an important role in creating a realistic impression of a school—especially its atmosphere, which is the strongest determinant of school choice. Good lecturers and clear communications regarding job possibilities also attract new students and enhance current students’ satisfaction. A strong connection with the school and fellow students creates alumni who are fans and who will play a role in attracting new students through word-of-mouth. Social networking sites, especially Facebook and LinkedIn, can help the school maintain contact with such fans. The study’s results can help schools optimize their recruiting strategies and digital marketing strategies to attract new students and to distinguish themselves from other schools.