ASSIGNMENT SUBMISSION COVER SHEET

INTERNATIONAL ISLAMIC UNIVERSITY, ISLAMABAD

Course Name RESEARCH MARKETING

Assignment THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL MEDIS ON
CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR
Submitted To MAM UZMA NOOR
Student Name RUQAYYA MUHAMMED SALEEM (5194)

AMBREEN JAN (5195)

Sem./Sec. Semester 6 BBA (38)
Date 14-OCT-2020
Total Pages (incl. Cover Sheet) 1

POST SUBMISSION INFORMATION Marks / Grade

Professor’s Comments

THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL MEDIA ON BUYING BEHAVIOUR OF

CONSUMERS

INTRODUCTION
This study is to analyze the impact of social media on buying behavior of customers. The
increasing focus on social media shaped state of the art advertising and shifted the way
companies interact with their target groups. This study explores how social media influencing the
decision process of consumers.
Social media is consumer-generated media that covers a wide variety of new sources online
information, created and used by consumers intent on sharing information with other regarding
any topic of interest. The social media revolution has led to new ways of seeking and obtaining
information on the multitude of products and services in the market.
In recent years, the online environment is viewed by users from a new perspective, in a
commercial way. Its development and the emergence of online stores have turned users into
consumers. Also, the most important role of social media has changed the way of how
consumers and marketers communicate.
Increasing focus on global development and the expansive use of technology in marketing,
advertising and promotion have led to shifts in the way in which companies focus on consumers.
At the same time, advertising and promotion often focus on the psychological, emotional, and
social factors influencing consumer behaviors, elements that must be incorporated into
technology based. Rather than focusing on short-term advertising through technology, adept
companies are integrating social media mechanisms to enhance the relationship with consumers.
Companies frequently focus on three of the most widely used social media platforms for use in
product marketing and branding. These days online networking turns out to be a piece of an
individual's life. Internet based life, for example, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or LinkIn has a
numeral number of the client and continues developing each day.
More than any time in the past, companies is recognizing the value of the use of methods to
engage consumers in a way that continually reintroduces the product, increases the appeal of
products, or identifies social components to product experiences.
Of the three social media platforms identified as commonly used by companies to support
marketing and branding (i.e. Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook), about 93% of businesses use
some form of social networking for marketing and branding. There are more than 200 million
active online users in the United States who spend more than 29 hours spent on online browsing,
product assessment and networking.
Wang and others have stated that the results of the mere exposure effect are still controversial
(Wang, Chao, Qin, & Wang, 2019). Studies have found: 1) That advert exposure time has little
to no effect in the short-term in increasing positive actual purchase behavior (Carreon, Nonaka,
Asahi, & Yamashiro, 2019); 2) Mere exposure effect does not always occur for every part of
the repeated advertising images and that attention would modulate the mere exposure effect for
advertising images (Tagi & Inoue, 2018); and 3) That the quality of engagement affects
familiarity. Only when participants were aware of the stimuli did exposure increase liking and
recognition (de Zilva, Vu, Newell, & Pearson, 2013). As Crisp and others noted “While the
mere exposure effect robustly leads to more liking for stimuli that are novel and neutral in
connotation, this research suggests that with initially negative attitudes repeated exposure may
strengthen these negative affective reactions” (Crisp, Hutter, & Young, 2009). Perhaps
nowhere is this more evident than on social media platforms. The advent of social media, when
coupled with the fact that 90% of Americans have Internet access illustrates that the impact of
mere exposure effect today requires substantial examination (Anderson, Perrin, Jiang, &
Kumar, 2019). Grimes and Kitchen (2007) have noted “given the accelerating complexity of
media and consumer environments, mere exposure effects to advertising stimuli now play an
increasingly significant role in forming and influencing consumer decision making. As such, the
development of methodologies to study these effects represents a major contemporary challenge
for market research.” Therefore, an assessment of the impact of mere exposure effect on the
college-aged population that so heavily relies upon social media is necessary to identify the
impact of repetitive advertising in today’s global marketplace defined by continuous
technological disruption. Smith and Anderson (2018) state that more than 95% of college-aged
students use social media while 27.2% of students spent more than six hours on social media a
week.
The video-sharing site YouTube—which contains many social elements, even if it is not a
traditional social media platform—is now used by nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults and 94%
of 18- to 24-year-olds. Some 78% of 18- to 24-year-olds use Snapchat, and a sizeable majority of
these users (71%) visit the platform multiple times per day. Recently, some organizations have
begun replacing part of their internal processes with social media platforms with video, such as
Snapchat (Van Esch & Mente, 2018). Similarly, 71% of Americans in this age group now use
Instagram and close to half (45%) are Twitter users (Smith & Anderson, 2018). Digita Global
reported that for every minute in 2017 an estimated 650,000 searches were made on Google,
over 700 videos were hosted on YouTube, over 700,000 status updates and 500,000 comments
were posted on Facebook, over 65,000 tweets were made, and approximately 180 million emails
were sent (Digita Team, 2018). With so many current or potential customers online and using
social media, Ha found that digital advertising spending surpassed traditional ads in 2019 (Ha,
2019). U.S. digital ad spending will increase 19.1% in 2019 to $129.3 billion, while traditional
advertising will fall 19% to $109.5 billion. That means digital will account for 54.2% of the total,
while traditional will only represent 45.8% (Ha, 2019). Additionally, reports show that 6.77
million people published blogs on blogging websites and more than 12 million people write
blogs using their social network (Van Esch, Arli, Castner, Talukdar, & Northey, 2018).
Guttmann has determined that by 2020, advertisers are expected to spend over $10 billion more
on promoting their products on social networks (Guttmann, 2019)

LITRATURE REVIEW
1. The Development of Social Media Marketing
1.1 In recent years, social networking sites and social media have increased in popularity, at a
global level. For instance, Facebook is said to have more than a billion active users (as of 2012)
since its beginning in 2004 (www.facebook.com). Social networking sites can be described as
networks of friends for social or professional interactions (Trusov, Bucklin, & Pauwels, 2009).
Indeed, online social networks have profoundly changed the propagation of information by
making it incredibly easy to share and digest information on the internet (Akrimi &
Khemakhem, 2012). The unique aspects of social media and its immense popularity have
revolutionized marketing practices such as advertising and promotion (Hanna, Rohm, &
Crittenden, 2011). Social media has also influenced consumer behavior from information
acquisition to post-purchase behavior such as dissatisfaction statements or behaviors (Mangold
& Faulds, 2009) and patterns of Internet usage (Ross et al., 2009; Laroche et al., 2012). Social
media is ‘‘a group of internet based applications that builds on the ideological and technological
foundations of Web 2.0, and it allows the creation and exchange of user-generated content’’
(Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010, p.61). Social media has many advantages as it helps connect
businesses to consumers, develop relationships and foster those relationships in a timely manner
and at a low cost as Kaplan and Haenlein discovered (2010). Other functions of social media
involve affecting and influencing perceptions, attitudes, and end behavior (Williams & Cothrell,
2000), while bringing together different like-minded people (Hagel & Armstrong, 1997). In an
online environment, Laroche (2012) pointed out that people like the idea of contributing,
creating, and joining communities to fulfill needs of belongingness, being socially connected,
and recognized or simply enjoying interactions with other like-minded members. The much
higher level of efficiency of social media compared to other traditional communication channels
prompted industry leaders to state that companies must participate in Facebook, Twitter,
MySpace, and others, in order to succeed in online environments (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010;
Laroche et.al. 2012). Thus, more industries try to benefit from social media as they can be used
to develop strategy, accept their roles in managing others’ strategy or follow others’ directions
(Williams & Williams, 2008). Social media websites provide an opportunity for companies to
engage and interact with potential and current consumers, to encourage an increased sense of
intimacy of the customer relationship, and build all important meaningful relationships with
consumers (Mersey, Malthouse, & Calder 2010) especially in today’s business environment
when consumer loyalty can vanish at the smallest mistake, which can additionally have online
propagation of their unfortunate encounter with a particular product, service, brand or company.
Some companies are beginning to take notice of the power of social media. A few corporate
social networking websites already allow consumers to not only exchange information about
products or services, but also engage in co-creating value in online experiences with offline
outcomes, with both current and potential consumers.

2. Segmentation of Social Media

2.2 Users Following the general idea that segmentation can leverage a better understanding of
consumers’ behavior, and therefore a better targeting, in order to obtain the desired effect of any
marketing activity, several studies have been employed to achieve a segmentation of consumers
who interact online, particularly to examine their online shopping behavior. Vellido et al. (1999)
investigated consumers’ opinion on online purchasing and online vendors that seem to consist of
the underlying dimensions ‘‘control and convenience,’’ ‘‘trust and security,’’ ‘‘affordability,’’
‘‘ease of use,’’ and ‘‘effort/responsiveness.’’ Using these dimensions as a segmentation base
discerns seven segments: ‘‘unconvinced,’’ ‘‘security conscious,’’ ‘‘undecided,’’ ‘‘convinced,’’
‘‘complexity avoiders,’’ ‘‘cost conscious,’’ and ‘‘customer service wary.’’ Starting from
consumers’ motivations to use the Internet, McDonald (1996) segmented the Internet audience as
‘‘avid adventurers,’’ ‘‘fact collectors,’’ ‘‘entertainment seekers,’’ and ‘‘social shoppers.’’ Also,
Brengman et al. (2005) performed a cluster analysis based on seven factors, such as “Internet
convenience” “perceived self-inefficacy”, “Internet logistics”, “Internet distrust”, “Internet
offer”, “Internet window-shopping”.
2.3 Mere Exposure Effect
What characterizes the mere exposure effect? In psychology, this effect refers to the fact that a
repeated stimulus is rated more positively as the result of an earlier presentation (Kaltwasser,
2019). “The brain can process the stimulus more easily when confronted again; this builds trust,
and the memory involved will generally be a positive one. The prerequisite, however, that the
first contact is always a neutral one.
Even frequent confrontation is not enough to turn a negative feeling into a positive one. The
mere exposure effect is the psychological reason why content marketing works so well, but
constant stimuli (content) are required before a positive assessment of a brand or company
results” (Kaltwasser, 2019). The demonstrated impact of social media today, when coupled with
its projected significance, makes social media advertising a fertile ground for practitioners and
researchers.

2.4 Interactive Advertising

The past several decades reveals a steady decline in newspaper readership and magazine
circulation, and TV viewership has raised 48% over the past 8 years (Perez, 2019). The
emergence of the Internet, by its very nature, has enhanced content and file sharing applications,
which in turn have shaped the creation and distribution mechanisms as the forefront to social
media and more interactive or intuitive advertising.
Total digital ad spending grew 19% to $129.34 billion in 2019 which is 54.2% of the estimated
total U.S. ad spending. Where are the digital dollars coming from? Directories, such as the
Yellow Pages, will take the biggest hit down 19% in 2019. Traditional print (newspapers and
magazines) spending is a close second, which will ijms.ccsenet.org International Journal of
Marketing Studies Vol. 12, No. 3; 2020 75 drops nearly 18% in 2018. Traditional ad spending’s
share in the U.S. will drop to 45.8% in 2019, from 51.4% in 2018 (eMarketer Editors, 2019).
The paper also took into account that certain responses to ads may be based upon an individuals’
emotional response and that the resulting emotional response and attitude to the advertisement
act as causal mechanisms responsible for product-related attitudes (Northey, Dolan, Etheridge,
Septianto, & Van Esch, 2020).

METHODOLOGY:
As mentioned at the beginning of the study, the research is trying to explore the relationships
between social media consumer buying behavior from the perspective of the consumer.

Time
Consumer
Social Media Convenience
Intention
Trust

The scope of the study will concentrate on the effect of social media platform on Consumer
buying behavior and suggest new ways to make social media more effective on consumer
psychology of buying the product. Social lifestyle builds a method of a business reputation for
responding to the complaints immediately through social media.
The present research aims to observe whether social networks in any way influence their
decisions whether or not consumers purchase from online.

The present research aims 6 objectives:

1. Measuring the degree of consumer confidence in purchasing products online.
2. Identifying the consumer profile that purchase products from online.
3. Determining the reasons for which consumers purchase products online.
4. Consumer attitudes study toward other consumer feedback from online.
5. Defining the categories of product that consumers buy online.
6. Identifying the maximum amount that consumers are willing to pay online.

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