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.

Using Social Media Marketing for Competitive Advantage

Social media provides companies innovative ways to market their products and services to their customers. The social media tools, such as Facebook, provides new ways to reach customers. With increasing number of people being connected to social media, businesses of all types are targeting social media as a new platform to reach their customers and strengthen customer relationships. Still, many companies are unsure as to how they can use social media for their advantage. There is lack of resources and fear of failure that hold many companies back from using social media in their marketing campaigns. Companies need a set of guidelines to understand how they can develop long-term, successful marketing strategies that involve social media as a significant component. This chapter analyzes use of social media marketing to suggest some ways companies can use social media to generate value both for them and their customers. This chapter also discusses how companies can develop a social media marketing strategy.

Online Service Failure and Recovery Strategy

The Internet environment has transformed the concepts of service failure and recovery strategies from a dyadic customer-provider focus into a multidimensional web quality scope. In traditional encounters, the research spectrum of service failure and recovery strategies is very much developed from a customer service approach, and the responsibility of recovery has been traditionally assumed to be something that is assigned to the marketer. Studies pay little or no attention to the multidimensional nature of service failures contingent to recovery strategies in the evolving social media. To date, empirical studies have focused on service failures and recovery strategies in online marketing environments, but pay limited attention to social media platforms. This paper aims to provide some insights on the need for a broader conceptualisation of service failure and recovery strategies, incorporating social media platforms for the development of effective marketing communications programme.

The Roles of Social Media Marketing and Brand Management in Global Marketing

This chapter explains the roles of social media marketing and brand management in global marketing, thus describing the theoretical and practical concept of social media marketing, the overview of brand management, the significance of social media marketing, and the application of social media-related brand management in global marketing. The creation of social media marketing and brand management is necessary for modern organizations that seek to serve suppliers and customers, increase business performance, enhance competitiveness, and gain routine success in global business. Thus, it is vital for modern organizations to acknowledge their social media marketing and brand management utilization, establish a strategic plan to consistently evaluate their effective promotions, and immediately respond to social media marketing and brand management needs of customers. The chapter argues that applying social media marketing and brand management in global marketing has the potential to enhance organizational performance and achieve strategic goals in the digital age.

Social Media

Social media is seen very much as a marketing tool and there is little in the literature that considers its use as a strategic decision making tool. This conceptual paper is an attempt to redress the balance. Social media user-generated content from blogs or consumer feedback are methods that social media can support effective strategic decision making. However, the business and organisational environments are influential on the effective of the data collected and ultimately its analysis. The decision making approach – single or multistage are significant influencers on the quality of the decisions. Multistage decision making is supportive of controversial decision making, which leads to better utilisation of the information and consequently, better decision making. Ultimately, robust decision making is underpinned by the effectiveness of the decision making process.

User-Generated Content and Perceived Customer Value

The Internet has transformed social communications and social behaviours. Technology-aided interpersonal interactions have replaced traditional ‘face-to-face' affiliations. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the effect of user-generated content on perceived customer value. In contrast to prior study mainly investigates the effect of two main areas, namely, customer and company, this study additionally widens the scope and influence of user-generated content on consumer-to-consumer communications. Our findings suggest that user-generated content mediates on consumer decision-making process, providing higher-order credibility beyond the conventional marketing communication programmes.

State Fragility and Stakeholder Engagement

In situations where government functions are in short supply as with most developing countries particularly Nigeria, issues concerning stakeholder engagement and stakeholder voice are usually on the back burner as a consequence. In this chapter, the authors argues that such landscape is midwifed and sustained by state fragility, which is a situation where government is incapacitated to provide basic social goods as well as infrastructures and enabling institutions that can facilitate corporate-stakeholder engagement and stakeholders' voice amplification. In the Nigerian petroleum industry, this contentious issue are redoubled, given the controversial dynamics of the sector. As this chapter contends, new media (as opposed to old media) has the potentials to facilitate better engagement in corporate-stakeholder dialectics, which can be a harbinger of amplification of stakeholders' voice for sustainable relations and engagement in the industry. In a fragile state, traditional media has a monopoly of information dissemination and sharing, which traditionally limits stakeholder engagement/voice thereby frustrating efforts towards ensuring corporate-stakeholder engagement, corporate responsibility and accountability. Thus, this dilemma can be surmounted with the aid of new media as it is a communication/engagement tool that democratises the discursive space for deliberative corporate-stakeholder relations. It is hoped that this contention will help to illuminate perspectives on how the lingering corporate-stakeholder Catch-22 in Nigeria's petroleum sector can be better managed. Methodologically, literature on main issues in this chapter will be explored and a conceptual framework – stakeholder voice amplification method (SVAM) – will be developed that has the potential to advance knowledge on better corporate-stakeholder engagement in a fragile state such as Nigeria.

Loyalty Strategy and Social-CRM

Always on the lookout for novelty and innovation, companies are using social networks, which now occupy an important place in our daily. Users of social networks constitute a new target for retailers looking to evolve their loyalty programs. Through Facebook or twitter accounts, the company can develop a profile of the user and have an idea regarding their interests... Therefore, companies have a lot of opportunities through social CRM, to communicate, to develop their relationship programs and, in fine, to retain their customer. Although the social CRM is perceived as a business strategy it requires a technology platform, rules, processes and social characteristics. To ensure interaction with these tools, the company should ensure that the consumer adopts them in an abundant manner. This paper aims at examining the emergence of interaction across internet tools, the importance of managing customer relationship through social CRM and the determinants of why consumers adopt these tools by studying the case of Facebook in emerging countries.

Digital Marketing Strategy for Affinity Marketing

Integration of digital marketing into overall business strategy is no longer an option, it is imperative for success. Yet, not all have tapped into this. Another opportunity that could leverage an organisation in today's competitive environment is affinity marketing. Successful implementation of affinity marketing has the potential to enhance participation, raise revenue, increase retention and provide a mutually beneficial arrangement for the partners involved. Yet, despite its appeal and the popularity it achieved in the late 1980s and early 1990s, uptake of the scheme has slowed down. Whilst some affinity partners have embraced digital marketing to an extent, most are not using it effectively to drive and sustain their affinity marketing scheme. Cognisant that affinity marketing is still a lucrative area, this chapter sets forth a digital marketing strategy for affinity marketing, e-affinity marketing, as this is where the added value for the 21st century customer is envisioned.

Basics of Mobile Marketing Strategy

Recent years have witnessed a rapid growth in internet-enabled devices, including smartphones which have facilitated the performance of many tasks online. One of the major activities taking place on such online platforms is shopping. Indeed, smartphones are redefining the landscape of consumption from visiting conventional physical shops to consuming products and services in a digital arena. Despite a proliferation of both theoretical and empirical studies on smartphones marketplace, there is still a paucity of studies on how mobile phone devices enhance and facilitate consumption from physical marketplace to online marketspace. This chapter aims to contribute to extant studies on how smartphones impact on the consumption process.