Social Media’s Impact on Consumer Perceptions | Report

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Running head: SOCIAL MEDIA’S IMPACT ON CONSUMER PERCEPTIONS
SOCIAL MEDIA’S IMPACT ON CONSUMER PERCEPTIONS
Name of the Student
Name of the university
Author note

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SOCIAL MEDIA’S IMPACT ON CONSUMER PERCEPTIONS
Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................2
Literature review........................................................................................................................2
Key concepts identified from literature review..........................................................................4
Research Variables and Research Questions.............................................................................5
Independent Variable.............................................................................................................5
Dependent Variable................................................................................................................5
Research Questions................................................................................................................5
Hypothesis..................................................................................................................................5
Research Methodology...............................................................................................................6
Target participants..................................................................................................................6
Measure..................................................................................................................................6
Demographics........................................................................................................................7
Timeline for the research...........................................................................................................7
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SOCIAL MEDIA’S IMPACT ON CONSUMER PERCEPTIONS
Introduction
At present times, billions of people are connected in real time and in this content
social media can be said to as leading the race. The traditional methods of finding product
related informations have been discarded and the consumers are taking to the online medium.
Social media has become a more convenient as well as more important platform to promote
brands and it is supporting their marketing campaigns (Barcelos, Dantas & Sénécal, 2018).
The marketing campaigns through the social media have gained a lot of attention and this
does not stick to any specific industry. The customer’s perceptions on brands can be affected
by reading comments and getting to know the personal experience of other customers. In this,
paper the effects of social media on consumer perception of brand will be discussed upon.
Literature review
As per the research done by Brison, Byon & Baker III, (2016), the unfamiliar sports
brands are making social media as a medium to popularize their brands. For this purpose
these brands are courting athlete endorsers and the social media accounts of the same to reach
out to the customers. But nothing can be commented on the success of the same to reach out
the targeted customers. Social media such as Twitter has been extensively used for
endorsement campaigns for some unfamiliar sports brands. Brand awareness is the important
thing to popularize the products of a brand and thus brands are making social media a tool to
increase their brand awareness. Social media has become their marketing medium. The study
found out that consumers’ attitudes had changed towards the unfamiliar brands after they got
exposed to the tweets of endorser’s tweets.
As opined by Schivinski & Dabrowski, (2015), firm-created as well as user generated
social media brand communication has a significant influence on brand associations.
Evaluation of 302 data sets that were generated through the medium of online surveys, the
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SOCIAL MEDIA’S IMPACT ON CONSUMER PERCEPTIONS
authors found out that user generated social media brand communication certainly has a
positive impact on the customer loyalty towards a brand as well as the perceived quality of
the brand. Web 2.0 technological advantages are being taken by the companies to make social
media as an effective tool in promotion as well as relaying of informations related to the
brands. The use of social media has changed the one-way communication to two-way or
multi-dimensional or more specifically peer-to-peer communication. It is noticed that peer
interactions in case of brand communities such as Facebook brand fan page has positive
impact on the functional, symbolic as well as experimental brand community benefits which
in turn help in leveraging the loyalty of a brand.
As per the research done by Schivinski & Dabrowski, (2016), as Web 2.0
technologies are dominating, social networks has led the users of the Internet to get a online
exposure and in this case the most important of all is social networking. This has been
accepted as one of the effective tools as this fosters two way communications. The major
contribution of the internet and the Web 2.0 is proactive behaviour of the consumers in the
information as well as the process involved in purchasing products. Customers are making
use of social media platforms to access the products they desire to purchase and to gather
informations about the same. Brand equity is considered as a primary asset in the realms of
marketing and social media communication has been found to be having direct impacts on the
brand equity as well as the brand attitude. Brand communication can be said to be as
affecting the brand equity in as positive way. Firm created social media communication
positively impacts the brand equity and the most important thing is user-generated content
that carries a lot of information about both the product and the brands that proved to be useful
for the customers in terms of consumer-based brand equity.
Hudson, Huang, Roth & Madden, (2016) are of the opinion that, with every passing
day companies are keeping aside more funds for carrying out their marketing campaigns in

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SOCIAL MEDIA’S IMPACT ON CONSUMER PERCEPTIONS
the social media platforms. The main point is that the social media platforms have evolved as
dominant digital communication channel by the medium, of which the consumers learn about
different brands, can share information about their experience with a specific product and can
also communicate with the other consumers that have purchased the products of the brand
that they desire to purchase. The main advantage of the online medium is that customers can
go through the experience of other users and can then decide upon whether to invest on a
certain product. The authors have highlighted a important fact that whether social media can
change user perceptions also depends on different cultures that is the ones who are reluctant
enough to embrace the new technology of Web 2.0 can be out of the reach of the campaigns
done on social media platforms thus brands missing out on some may be potential customers.
As per the research done by Hansen, Kupfer & Hennig-Thurau, (2018) brands may
have spend years in building good reputation but at present time in the digital age it will not
take a fraction of second to destroy the brand image. Examples cited such as that of the
incident when the taxi drivers went on strike for an hour at the Kennedy Airport protesting
against Donald Trumps’ “Muslim Travel Ban”. When this incident was going on the cab
company Uber on Twitter announced, ““Surge pricing has been turned off at #JFK Airport”
and the company had to face the reactions of its customers. The consequences was such soon
hash tag #DeleteUber got viral and this transformed into a huge protest carried out by people
across the globe and Twitter was flooded with angry as well as emotional tweets. This
incident shows that on one hand where social media acts as a good medium for promoting
brands, on the other it can bring down the brand image just within few hours of time.
Key concepts identified from literature review
1. Web 2.0 technology and use of internet by majority of the world’s population has made the
companies to take to the social media platform to promote their brands.
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SOCIAL MEDIA’S IMPACT ON CONSUMER PERCEPTIONS
2. User generated social media brand communication has a significant influence on brand
associations.
3. Social media communications has a direct impact on the equity of a brand.
4. Multi-dimensional communication or two-way-communication or peer-to-peer
communication is one of the major factors why social media has become this dominant.
5. Social media can adversely affect a brand’s image if customers take to social media to
voice concerns and issues with the brand.
Research Variables and Research Questions
Independent Variable
Social media is the independent variable in the research.
Dependent Variable
Consumer perception of the brands depends on social media and thus in study consumer
perception is the dependent variable.
Research Questions
1. What are the effects of firm-created as well as user-generated social media brand
communication on the customer’s perception of brands?
2. How is social media marketing having a positive impact on the equity of brands and
enhancing brand image?
Hypothesis
H1: Social media marketing activities have a positive impact on brand awareness.
H2: Activities related to social media marketing have positive effect on the image of a brand.
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SOCIAL MEDIA’S IMPACT ON CONSUMER PERCEPTIONS
H3: Firm created social media brand communication has positive effect on the brand
associations.
Research Methodology
Primary research methodology will be considered for this research as in order to
understand the concepts views of public is required as social media as its name suggests
involves “pubic” (Mackey & Gass, 2015).
Target participants
The younger generation make use of the social media platform more as compared to
the older generations and thus in this research the participants will be university students.
Their views can be taken on the way they carry out online shopping which would help in
understanding if the powerful tool is changing their perceptions when deciding to purchase
different products.
Measure
The participants will be required to be the part of online survey and for this purpose a
survey questionnaire will be developed consisting of different questions related to the topic.
Some examples of the questions that can be included in the survey questionnaire are as given
below:
1. How much time do you spend on social media?
2. Do you follow the popular brands?
3. Do you prefer online shopping to offline shopping?

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SOCIAL MEDIA’S IMPACT ON CONSUMER PERCEPTIONS
Demographics
Social media usage has a direct link with the characteristics of the audience therefore
the survey will be include questions on their gender. The age will not be asked in this case as
the university students more or less fall under the same age range.
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SOCIAL MEDIA’S IMPACT ON CONSUMER PERCEPTIONS
Timeline for the research
Activities 1st to
3rd
Wee
k
4th to
10th
week
11th
to
13th
Week
14th
to
17th
Week
18th to
21st
Week
22nd
to
23rd
Week
24th
Week
Topic selection
Literature review
Creating a layout
Data collection
Analysis of the
collected data

Findings of the data
Conclusion
Draft
Submission of final
work

Table 1: Gantt chart (Source created by author)
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SOCIAL MEDIA’S IMPACT ON CONSUMER PERCEPTIONS
References
Barcelos, R. H., Dantas, D. C., & Sénécal, S. (2018). Watch your tone: How a brand's tone of
voice on social media influences consumer responses. Journal of Interactive
Marketing, 41, 60-80.
Brison, N. T., Byon, K. K., & Baker III, T. A. (2016). To tweet or not to tweet: The effects of
social media endorsements on unfamiliar sport brands and athlete
endorsers. Innovation, 18(3), 309-326.
Hansen, N., Kupfer, A. K., & Hennig-Thurau, T. (2018). Brand crises in the digital age: The
short-and long-term effects of social media firestorms on consumers and
brands. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 35(4), 557-574.
Hudson, S., Huang, L., Roth, M. S., & Madden, T. J. (2016). The influence of social media
interactions on consumer–brand relationships: A three-country study of brand
perceptions and marketing behaviors. International Journal of Research in
Marketing, 33(1), 27-41.
Mackey, A., & Gass, S. M. (2015). Second language research: Methodology and design.
Routledge.
Schivinski, B., & Dabrowski, D. (2015). The impact of brand communication on brand equity
through Facebook. Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing.
Schivinski, B., & Dabrowski, D. (2016). The effect of social media communication on
consumer perceptions of brands. Journal of Marketing Communications, 22(2), 189-
214.
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