This chapter reports on the use of social media marketing by pre-adults, setting off from a case study of pre-adults of different courses at a Portuguese higher education school. Data were collected through a questionnaire available online and analyzed with descriptive statistical techniques. Based on the pointed outlines, the aim is to evaluate longitudinally the types of social media used by pre-adults, the contexts in which they use each social media type, their opinions about the intentions of social media marketing and the influences of social media marketing on their brand knowledge, attitude and behaviour. Tendencies around concepts, tools and levels of attraction by the audiences, with focus on relationship marketing in the 2.0 era are revisited. Furthermore, the chapter presents the perception of pre-adults about social media marketing, and contributes with critical information that might help cast light over recent theories and practices of social media marketing.
TopIntroduction
Nowadays, companies are driven by a new environment characterized by highly intense competition, high concern for quality, excess production capacity and strong technological development. Therefore, marketing professionals have felt the need to satisfy, retain and engage their customers through an orientation towards long-term relationships. The relationship marketing paradigm and the requirement for its implementation on business organizations, to improve customer retention levels, are clearly recognized in the academic literature (e.g., Kumar & Reinartz, 2012; Payne & Frow, 2013; Peppers & Rogers, 2011).
On the other hand, web 2.0 technologies made it easier for business organizations to reach the consumers in actual global market. Web 2.0 has become a platform that is easily available to anyone with Internet access, has increased communication for organizations, fosters brand awareness, often improves customer service, and serves as a relatively inexpensive platform for organizations to implement marketing strategy developments (e.g., Evans & McKee, 2010; Greenberg, 2010; Wikström &Wigmo, 2010).
Social media employee web-based technologies to create highly interactive platforms via which individuals and companies share, discuss, co-create, and modify user-generated content. The various types of Internet communications such as YouTube, Blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, Second Life have attracted millions of users and their sites are used widely across the world. A new communication landscape appeared and prevails. Positive and negative communication about brands and companies happens, with or without their permission.
Thereby, the chapter reports on the use of social media marketing by pre-adult people (youngsters between 18 and 24 years old), setting off from a case study of students of different courses at a Portuguese higher education institution. The main objective is to evaluate longitudinally the use of social media by pre-adults and the influence of social media marketing in their brand knowledge, attitude and behaviour. Data were collected through a questionnaire available online collected in two moments in time, spaced by one year (January, 2013 and 2014) and analyzed with descriptive statistical techniques. Based on the pointed outlines, this research explores and analyzes four key issues:
- 1.
What are the types of social media that they are using?;
- 2.
In which contexts are they using each social media type?;
- 3.
What are their opinions about the intentions of social media marketing?; and
- 4.
How does social media marketing influence their brand knowledge, attitude and behaviour?.
The chapter begins with a background around the theme. After that, a state-of-the-art will be presented about the conceptualization of relationship marketing concepts and its intertwining with social media tools. It highlights that the development of a program for implementing and managing a successful customer relationship management system is an essential part of strategic marketing development, but obviously, could be a complex and longer process. The following section focuses on the methodological aspects of the empirical study, including the context of the case study used in the research and techniques for collecting and processing data. After that, the chapter follows with a statistical analysis of the data collected through questionnaire, i.e., the section is devoted to presenting and discussing the main results obtained. Concerns about the target audience, particularly, oriented on pre-adult people are considered. Furthermore, contributions with focus on the individual, like personality, social and cultural status are presented. Finally, the chapter ends with the main conclusions and future research directions.
TopBackground
The emerging capabilities of marketing information systems and, in particularly, of the customer relationship management subsystems have been configured as essential tools for translating data to useful information (e.g., Kotler & Keller, 2009; Turban, Aronson, Liang, & Sharda, R., 2007).