E-WOM Issues and Challenges

In the global era, Electronic Word of Mouth (E-WOM) has become an important emerging business strategy in the marketing and consumer environment. Along with the growth of digital connectivity and E-WOM, new ongoing challenges have also emerged for online users, businesses, and services. The chapter mainly aims to look closer upon how Electronic Word of Mouth faced challenges related to social, personal, psychological and human appeal in FMCG sector which influence customers as well as firms. The study used survey method to approach the respondents. The primary data was collected from 250 respondents and descriptive statistics and F-test ANOVA were used to test the significant of the association / non-association between variables. It was found that mostly customers have positive attitude towards E-WOM phenomenon. The study could help the FMCG Company in taking such steps that could make improvements in their business processes and expand their business without spending lot of money.

The Intersection of Social Media and Customer Retention in the Luxury Beauty Industry

Debates regarding the ontological relationship between Social Media and customer retention have attracted considerable attention, particularly in the luxury beauty industry. The use of Social Media in the luxury beauty industry has caused many heated debates as it is seen as a form of interference in the exclusivity of luxury brands by limiting the physical and sensual contact between brand and customer. The purpose of this chapter is to provide some insights into how social media impacts on the cosmetics industry. Further, we provide evidence that the effective application of social media in the luxury beauty industry could lead to wider market share, and customer retention. The chapter concludes with some strategies that practitioners and researchers can adopt to develop effective marketing communication strategies, using social media platforms.

mMarketing Opportunities for User Collaborative Environments in Smart Cities

Smart City infrastructures connect people with their devices through wireless communications networks while they offer sensor-based information about the city's status and needs. Connecting people carrying mobile devices equipped with sensors through such an infrastructure leads to the “collective intelligence” or “crowdsourcing” paradigm. This paradigm has been deployed in numerous contexts such as performing large-scale experiments (e.g., monitoring the pollution levels or analyzing mobility patterns of people to derive useful information about rush hours in cities) or gathering and sharing user collected experiences in efforts to increase privacy awareness and personal information protection levels. In this chapter, we will focus on employing this paradigm in the mMarketing/mCommerce domain and discuss how crowdsourcing can create new opportunities for commercial activities as well as expansion of existing ones.

An Analytical Study of the Facebook Content Management Strategies of Dominos India

This paper attempts to take a dive into the Facebook marketing approaches and tactics of Dominos India. With this paper, there has been an effort to analyse the content at the Facebook page of Dominos, while trying to figure out which kind of content was able to build more relationship with the consumers on the basis of number of likes, shares and comments. A relationship between the aforementioned variables has also been established using the Pearson Correlation Coefficient. Also, a simple linear regression model has been applied to these variables to further prove on this relationship in order to attest to the fact that more posts on the Facebook page result in higher traffic and better engagement. Facebook marketing is about indulging in quality interactions with the consumers and then tapping their sentiments. An online brand community can be built to engage with consumers and brands thus have an opportunity to exploit the potential of social media. A brand community is a non-geographical, virtual community pertaining to a brand built on the foundations of the social relations among the various stakeholders/admirers of the brand. To develop a brand community the companies create a page on Facebook concerning a particular brand. The advantage of such a community is that not only it leverages a wider reach for a particular brand but it also lets all the members build connections around the brand. Here, the freely expressed opinion of individuals can be recorded and the results can be quantified to gauge changes over time. Analysis on the gathered data can be done using various analytical tools.

Social Media Engagement

Generation Y is at the forefront of the rise in consumer engagement with brands due to the participatory nature of social media. Social media is largely user generated and is instrumental in the information uprising facilitated by the internet (Kamel & Hussein, 2014). The platform of social media has changed how people interact with each other and even with brands as well as how they make consumption decisions. This transformation has led to research to determine the parameters of said influence on the consumer-decision process within the developed world. This chapter reviews this research and gives directions on future research to include developing nations within Latin America and the Caribbean. Research in this area is important due to the fact that there are limited studies addressing the developing world's use of social media to inform consumption decisions even though consumers within these markets are using these platforms similarly to their developed world counterparts.

The Role of Business Model Development in the Ex-Post Creation of Online Entrepreneurial Opportunity

This research aims to tap into the largely opaque origins of opportunities in the online context by exploring the role of business model development as a key for the creation and configuration of the mental and social infrastructure necessary for the emergence of online entrepreneurial opportunity. Tracing the sources of online entrepreneurial opportunity reveals that successful online entrepreneurs claim to proactively manage their environment in terms of unfolding actions which result in the enactment and creation of entrepreneurial opportunities. Based on this real life contention and the emerging view of entrepreneurial opportunity, this chapter aims to achieve a deeper understanding on the creation of online opportunities through a quantitative study empirically testing the link between business model development and online entrepreneurial opportunity as creation in order to shed light on how business model generation shapes the way entrepreneurs socially co-create opportunities in the online context.

Web 2.0 Technologies and Marketing

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.

Sentiment Analysis of Social Media as Tool to Improve Customer Retention

Sentiment analysis is a process of determining the polarity (i.e. positive, negative or neutral) of a given text. The extremely increased amount of information available on the web, especially social media, create a challenge to be retrieved and analyzed on time, timely analyzed of unstructured data provide businesses a competitive advantage by better understanding their customers' needs and preferences. This literature review will cover a number of studies about sentiment analysis and finds the connection between sentiment analysis of social network content and customers retention; we will focus on sentiment analysis and discuss concepts related to this field, most important relevant studies and its results, its methods of applications, where it can be applied and its business applications, finally, we will discuss how can sentiment analysis improve the customer retention based on retrieved data.

Gaining a Continuous Retaining Relationship with Customers in Mobile Sector

One of the main characteristics of the global economy is the creation of oligopolistic markets. The decisions of those industries are characterised by interactivity. The risk arising from the domination of the power of oligopoly is the previous stage of manipulation of the market. This situation is against the concept of competitiveness and causes an entirely new situation to the customer's disadvantage. Mobile industry which is a typical oligopolistic market in Europe leads us to examine this specific market in Greece. Therefore, the present study examines the factors that influence the relationship marketing strategy of the industry. The research was conducted using a sample of 806 users of mobile phones. The method used for the quantitative analysis is chi-square test, discriminant analysis, which is based on Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA). The study has indicated that intense competition between mobile phone firms in Greece leads to the manipulation of consumers' behaviour. Also, findings of the current research demonstrate that firms create a unified policy in order to restrain their customers' consuming behaviour to a state of inertia, the customer passively re-buys the same service provider without much thought.

The Functions of the Narrator in Digital Advertising

Storytelling, which was taken over from traditional advertising, has been continuing existence of it sown in the World of digital advertising. Efficiency of storytelling is intensively used in digital advertisements with the aim of directing attention of consumers to the product and encouraging them to buy product. In digital advertisements, stories are narrated by storytellers. In this study, storytelling in digital advertising and different types of storytellers are examined and traces of storytelling which has existed from past to the present, are followed.