Gautam, V., and Sharma, V. (2017). The Mediating Role of Customer Relationship on the Social Media Marketing and Purchase Intention Relationship with Special Reference to Luxury Fashion Brands. Ellen Thornton

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Gautam, V., & Sharma, V. (2017). The Mediating Role of Customer Relationship on the Social Media Marketing and Purchase Intention Relationship with Special Reference to Luxury Fashion Brands. Journal of Promotion Management, 23(6), 872-888. Retrieved from https://journals.scholarsportal.info/details/10496491/v23i0006/872_tmrocrsrtlfb.xml

Ellen Thornton

When it comes to the evolution of online communication, social media was revolutionary, as it was one of the first tools that introduced the capability for users to communicate instantaneously with people without physically being in the same room with each other. Social media also helped users to build new relationships with people they have never met before and continue to build pre-existing relationships in a virtual environment. This feature is especially important to brands, as more and more companies began to include social media as a marketing tool to connect with both current and potential new consumers.

Gautam and Sharma’s (2017) article studied and analyzed how social media marketing impacted the customer relationships and purchase intentions of luxury fashion brands. The study discussed how brands using social media as a marketing tool were able to easily connect with their followers and were able to interact with them to find out what they are interested in, their reviews of their products, as well as having a detailed understanding of their targeted demographic. The study concluded that social media marketing has a positive effect on customers’ purchase intentions as they are able to build strong, long-term relationships with their customers and really understand what kind of products or designs they are looking for from a brand and can produce exactly what they want.

In order to understand how much of an impact social media marketing has on a brand and their customers, the authors listed specific marketing activities that were considered important factors in building customer relationships. These activities included entertainment, customization, interaction, word of mouth, and trend. This was important to the study as it went into more detail than simply looking at the number of likes or comments on a brand’s posts on a certain platform. In addition, these factors were associated with relationship marketing, which the authors describe as brands and companies focusing on their relationship and interaction with consumers. This bond is what the authors found most essential for social media marketing to be done successfully. Another strength of the article is when the authors describe the type of relationships that the luxury fashion brands are trying to build with their consumers, they define trust and intimacy within the context of social media marketing strategies, and why they are essential to achieve with their customers in order to have a successful marketing campaign on social media. This helps readers to change the definitions they use and believe for trust and intimacy in order to understand how they relate to social media and marketing, as well as how they can be measured when analyzing online relationships with customers.

Although the article has a very detailed analysis of how social media marketing impacts customer relationships and purchase intentions, there is one weakness to the article pertaining to the method of data collection. For the study, the authors decided to have participants fill out a questionnaire with answers evaluated on a 5-point Likert scale, ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree. While this does give an idea about how potential consumers feel about brands building relationships with them through social media marketing, the authors missed an opportunity to obtain more in-depth data, as they only received answers from one single perspective. A solution to this problem would have been if the authors looked at a specific brand’s posts on a social media platform and analyze the customer interaction and engagement with the brand through the number of likes and the content of comments. This type of data would give statistical evidence of customer-brand relationships, and included with the comments and questionnaires from study participants, would give a more well-rounded result of just how much social media marketing impact a brand’s customer relationships and purchase intentions. The extra data from engagement of posts would also function as extra proof to validate the statements made by the questionnaire participants.

In conclusion, this article provides a detailed analysis of how social media marketing strategies can have a positive effect on customer relationships and purchase intentions when used by luxury fashion brands. The authors encourage all brands to invest in marketing through social media to reach a wide audience of consumers, both old and new, and that social media is an excellent way to interact and really engage with them in order for them to feel included.

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