Social Media Marketing Applications and Fashion Brands: A South Asian Perspective

Introduction

South Asia, a growth champion, hit a major setback since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic resulting in stringent lockdowns and disrupted supply chains turning it into one of the worst-performing economic regions in the world (Un.org, 2021). With the global demand shocks, recovery, and containment measures against COVID-19, the South Asian economy is predicted to slow down to 5.5% in 2023 before growing in 2024. The largest economy in South Asia, and the fifth largest in the world, is India, which alone is estimated to drop by 6.9% in the 2022-23 fiscal year, while Bangladesh is expected to slow down by up to 5.2% due to rising inflation and tightening financial conditions (World Bank Group, 2023). Responding to the pandemic, technological changes, and widespread structural transformation, the global economy has given rise to digital technologies, enabling productivity enhancements in some sectors, such as manufacturing and creating new markets (The World Bank, 2021). The economic diversifications are low or minimal in this region; achieving resilience to external shocks is a top priority which would mean that a more integrated regional economy, along with the expedition of economic reforms and transformations, would help the countries in the South Asian region grow significantly (Un.org, 2021).

In low-income economies with rapidly developing markets like South Asia, globalization and technological advancements have resulted in a collective increase in smartphone usage and penetration of Internet services, leading to more active online communities, which marketers use to reach their customers (Otugo et al., 2015). It was also found that most people from emerging and developing economies are more likely than others to use social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter and use these services more frequently (Poushter, 2016).

Social media is built on the ideological and technological foundations afforded by Web 2.0 in the form of internet-based applications that facilitate creating and disseminating user-generated content. Social media has overtaken traditional forms of marketing recently (Borker, 2014; Doshi et al., 2023). Social media provides a cost-effective platform for social conversation, promoting goods and services, and allowing interactive engagement regardless of customers' location (Olotewo, 2016). Users can interact with products and services positively or negatively through direct editing or generating information about an organization and sharing it with members of their networks (Gilfoil & Jobs, 2012). It, therefore, results in a multidirectional message that signals to organizations, current or potential consumers, thereby engaging the entire ecosystem, rather than a one-way message between the brand and the consumer (Parveen et al., 2015).

The rising internet usage rates and the expanding social media user base have led Asia-Pacific to become a top contributor to social media penetration. Social media sites experience a much higher volume of usage than other sites (Rahman, 2016). The South Asian region alone contributes to 18.5% of global internet users, second only to Eastern Asia (Kemp, 2023). The APAC region has positioned itself as a high-volume market in the social media space, expecting to add about 59 million more users than the rest of the world, even with just a 2.7% predicted YoY growth in 2023 (Cheung, 2023). Within APAC, India (467 million) and China (983 million) maintain a stronghold of active users (Kameke, 2023). Facebook retains its stronghold as the most widely used platform globally, with ~2.9 billion users (Dixon, 2023).