The Impact Of Samsung's Social Media Strategy On Consumer Buying Behavior: An Essay.

Use of Social Media Tools and Growth of Business in Samsung

Question:

Explain the Business Capstone Project.
 

In a strictly competitive market of the present world, it is not sufficient for an organization, to just engage in the activities of production and sale of a commodity, but it must be able to exercise remarkable influence on the mindset of the consumers. In a market in which many companies sell homogeneous products, the online presence of an organization is very important. Social media can enable a company influence its customers to buy its newly launched products, as well as can help the organization to reach out to a huge number of customers solving their queries, complaints or grievances. Considering this fact, the following research intends to explore the relation between Samsung’s use of social media, and the way it intends to influence the  consumer buying behavior (Fuchs 2013).

This research has the following objectives:

• To examine how far the consumers are affected by the online advertisement and promotion, or public rating and review of a Samsung on the social media
• To investigate how many consumers feel that their problems are solved when they interact with the Customer Service executives of Samsung
• To find out how many of the consumers use social sites regularly, and in the process engage themselves to know more about newly launched products and attractive offers of Samsung.
• To investigate to what extent does a company like Samsung is liable to fall prey to the negative consequence of social media.
• To discover what steps does Samsung take, by implementing CRM, or maintaining an active customer support system, to curb the negative effects of social media tools on their public image (Jussila et al. 2014). 

Use of Social Media Tools and Growth of business in Samsung:

In the last few years, Samsung has succeeded in outrivaling its competitors such as Nokia, and Apple, in the market of smart phones and phablets. According to Vivaldi Partners, the very reason behind the unprecedented success of Samsung in the smart phone market is caused by its regular interaction with the customers, promoting their products with exquisite offers on social media as well as by having conversation with them as to maintain their loyalty to their company. With the digital revolution that has started with the beginning of the twenty first century, the consumers spend more time in researching a product online, comparing the cost and facility of each device, and after viewing the public ratings and reviews only, decide to buy a product (West 2013). As it is already a well known fact that Samsung and Sony are two very reputed big commercial giants in the market of High Definition television, but yet Samsung has been found to win the battle in the last few years, owing to its social media strategy. According to Szymeczko, the Social media specialist of Samsung, the company engages its customers constantly through interactions via Instagram, Twitter, whereby the followers are not only informed about the new products, but also the discounts available and the reviews. As a result, more consumers are fascinated by the innovative style and cool features of the television sets (Aral et al. 2013).

Figure 1: Social Currency Wheel Showing a Comparative Study of Samsung and Sony

As the above diagram suggests, the research conducted by Vivaldi partners Group suggested that Samsung has been able to grow its market twice more than Sony, simply because of its online presence. The company not only interacts regularly with the customers, by keeping them updated about the latest model and its features and designs, but also draws new potential consumers, as their posts get further circulated among the masses, through the increasing number of Likes or Shares on Facebook or Twitter (Turban et al. 2012).

Companies such as Samsung actually develop and expand their market by taking help of the social habit of the young generation of people. A recent research held, showed that there has been an approximate 7% increase in the use of social media tools in recent times. With the popularity of social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter, people are not only following their friends and family, but also their favorite brands. In case, they are liking and commenting on the posts of such companies, it is getting viral among his friends as well (Andrews et al. 2015).

Increase in the Use of Social Sites in the Recent Era

Figure 2: Increase in the Use of Social Sites in the Recent Era

Keeping this in mind, the active presence in social media tools has hugely affected the business performance of Samsung smart phones as well as electronic appliances.

Use of CRM Software by Samsung to Stay Informed About the Consumer Trend:

However, if an organization intends to engage itself in social sites, it must ensure that it can cope up with the negative feedback and take necessary steps. For this reason, Samsung has already implemented CRM software, to be able to track the negative response of its customers and to be able to avoid any kind of customer churn. Through the implementation of CRM software, Samsung not only is able to measure the satisfaction level of its existent consumers, but also avoids the possibility of negative responses by taking quick as well as effective steps (Cioca et al. 2013).

The researcher for conducting the proposed research will take help of the Quantitative Method of Research, which will help the researcher to get statistical information about the consumer trend of Samsung before reaching a generalized conclusion. The researcher as part of the Quantitative Method of research, will conduct a survey on the regular users of social media tools, and will be asked to respond as to how far they are influenced by the online advertisement, public response or review while buying a product from Samsung.

The research process will consist of a survey, that will be conducted both online as well as with the help of face to face interaction with the respondents. Here, the respondents will be given a questionnaire whereby they will have to tick a Yes, No or Maybe, in response to the questions (Creswell et al. 2013).

The data will be collected by distributing questionnaires among the consumers of Samsung. Since, the research will focus on the consumers of Samsung mainly, the Focus Group method will also be used whereby direct, face to face interaction with the consumers will help to reach the answers to the questions, as well as explore new facts useful for conducting the research further. The researcher will employ the Non probability Method of Sample collection, because the researcher will conduct the research on a selected group of people. The respondents have to be selected on the basis of two criteria- (i) they have to be the consumers of Samsung who also use social media regularly, and (ii) their age must lie between 18 to 55 years. The researcher, for the collection of data, will employ the Purposive Sampling Method, which will enable him to collect the data from a selected group of respondents, who are chosen because of their common interest in social media and their consumption of social media apps (Leary et al. 2013).

The researcher expects that by conducting the research he will be able to discover the extent to which social media affects the business of Samsung. Here, on the one hand, the researcher is expected to discover not only the positive outcome of the use of social media tools, but also exactly which social sites or which online promotion strategy works best for drawing new consumers. This will help the researcher unravel a new fact as to which social strategies should be adopted by the small organizations to fully develop and expand its business. Further, this is expected to bring to light how far the installation of software like CRM can help the companies to keep a track on the consumer behavior on social sites, as these software help  in informing the organization as to how many visitors have visited its page, how many have posted any negative comment, etc (Tuten et al. 2013). 

Reference List:

Andrews, K. and Mickahail, B., 2015. Business and Social Media: Collaboration for the Sixth Discipline. Social Media and the Transformation of Interaction in Society, p.158.

Aral, S., Dellarocas, C. and Godes, D., 2013. Introduction to the special issue-social media and business transformation: A framework for research.Information Systems Research, 24(1), pp.3-13.

Cioca, M., Ghete, A.I., Cioca, L.I. and Gîfu, D., 2013, October. Machine Learning and Creative Methods Used to Classify Customers in a CRM Systems. In Applied Mechanics and Materials (Vol. 371, pp. 769-773).

Creswell, J.W., 2013. Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. Sage publications.

Fuchs, C., 2013. Social media: A critical introduction. Sage.

Goh, K.Y., Heng, C.S. and Lin, Z., 2013. Social media brand community and consumer behavior: Quantifying the relative impact of user-and marketer-generated content. Information Systems Research, 24(1), pp.88-107.

Jussila, J.J., Kärkkäinen, H. and Aramo-Immonen, H., 2014. Social media utilization in business-to-business relationships of technology industry firms.Computers in Human Behavior, 30, pp.606-613.

Kim, A.J. and Ko, E., 2012. Do social media marketing activities enhance customer equity? An empirical study of luxury fashion brand. Journal of Business Research, 65(10), pp.1480-1486.

O'Leary, Z., 2013. The essential guide to doing your research project. Sage.

Turban, E., King, D., Lee, J.K., Liang, T.P. and Turban, D.C., 2015. Social Commerce: Foundations, Social Marketing, and Advertising. In Electronic Commerce (pp. 309-364). Springer International Publishing.

Tuten, T.L. and Solomon, M.R., 2014. Social media marketing. Sage.

West, D.M., 2013. Air Wars: Television Advertising and Social Media in Election Campaigns, 1952-2012: Television Advertising and Social Media in Election Campaigns, 1952-2012. Sage.