Digit Age : Fall Of Traditional Brand Management

The use of social media marketing has become a standard way in which organizations advertise their products or services. Social media marketing allows consumers to have immediate access to other consumers reviews or to post a review about a product or service. There is engagement between the company and the consumer (Evans, Dave 2010). Social Media emerged in the late 1980’s when websites such as Prodigy, Compuserve and America Online. Prodigy was first of it’s kind and was known as a ”consumer online service”. Half of the page is devoted to advertising. Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Hi5, Bebo and Orkut are all social media platforms that are utilized as platforms today.

Social media has become an influential ground for consumers to share their opinions about a company’s brand and products. In addition, it helps in having a strong brand that produces positive relations and distinguish the brand from competitors, is a critical component for effective marketing. According to Dahlén and Lange (2009) “the quality of the product is not the evident factor when it comes to purchasing a product, the deciding factor depends on how the brand is perceived” (Para. 1). This demonstrates the importance of incorporating social media as a tool to promote brands, allow for interactions, and customer satisfaction by engaging with customers more frequently for feedbacks or reviews. Thus create an opportunity for the company to show its devotion to their customers, and initiate good reputation, which can increase sales. In other words, social media has the ability to upsurge the awareness for businesses as well as the brand.

Mark W. Shaefer is a successful businessman that built his company while spending zero dollars on marketing. “I built my entire business without spending a dime on advertising or marketing in three and half years. All of my business has come from my blog, Twitter, and LinkedIn.” (Bell 34) By using the platforms that many individuals visit on a daily basis, free business exposure is created. “Social media is rapidly replacing traditional media as a source to which consumers turn for information about products and brands.” (Brison 309) Much like in the past, consumers want to learn about a product before purchasing it.

A study by Dr. Kleppinger defined the personal digital brand as a strategic self- marketing effort, crafted via social media platforms, which seeks to exhibit an individual’s professional persona. While discussing advantages and disadvantages of such marketing effort, Dr. Kleppinger mentions “social media also gives professionals a connection to past, current, and potential colleagues”. This is the one out of many reason, personal branding will be around for a long time. While it allows individuals to not only connect personally

Lately, there have been issues of brand management on the internet. The new digital tools require a lot of adjustments at the executional stage. According to Chaffey (2000) Internet marketing success depends on the sites interactivity features. Also added that a brand’s presence online should be conceived in a way that is sympathetic to the technology and the environment. Many brands fail in the execution of different features resulting in customers’ needs and expectations not being met says Hewson and Coles (2001) The consumer still looks up to the luxury brands although the bond is presently being evolved beyond the existing “top-down” model. (Okonkowo, 2009) The percentage of online shoppers and the sales of luxury brands have been on a positive growth. In spite of the growth, it’s not clear that what drives the consumers to shop online and whether they would be interested in shopping if attractive online stores were introduced. Therefore, what factors affect consumers to shop online will be examined here. A framework is necessary to develop the complex system and determine these factors, influences and buying behaviors of the consumer. (Perea, 2004) Affluent consumers use the internet as their powerful source of information about the luxury products and it is necessary that they have an online presence.

Personal branding is a concept that is geared for all people.  It is not just for famous people. Suze Orman started off like a normal person, but now she carries a strong name brand.  A simple person who wants to be successful and start branding their name.  Years later, they  may become a normal brand name in someone household.   The high increase in online searches and social media platform, personal branding, is relevant. According to Cohen (2014), personal branding is a necessity and marketers need to learn to understand branding.   Cohen (2014) stated personal branding  is required to establishing a good reputation with the consumers, with a good reputation that will be credibility, and personal branding is about enhancing longevity.   This paper will discuss what is needed in personal branding to be successful and why personal branding is important.

When any consumer likes a Facebook page, monitors a brand via Twitter or relates with a brand's existence on various social media networks like YouTube, Google+ or Twitter, a connection forms between the brand and the customer (Hennig-Thurau, et al., 2010). 19% of customers buy "often," and twenty nine percent of the customers buy “sometimes” due to their bonding with the brand. “There is a definite correlation between a customer liking a brand online and consumer's possibility to buy that brand," according to Social Vibe CMO John Capano. "People often follow brands on social media sites not because they find them adorable but because they want to acquire something," pointed Lieb. All Likes may not be equal (Libai, et al., 2010).

The marketing industry is an elaborate network that links companies to their consumers, primarily through written communication. The main objective of marketing is to identify trends and patterns in consumer behavior, and utilize the data to influence consumers to purchase more goods. From a macroenviroment standpoint, the general conditions of a market are heavily dependent on global environmental factors. The most significant factor that influences the markets today is technological advancements. Since the release of Facebook, Linked-in, Twitter, and Myspace in the early 2000s, the number of people using social media has increased to over sixty-five percent. The ever-growing dependency on social media platforms, has given marketers the tremendous opportunity to further market potential consumers. Social media marketing is a specific form of marketing that focuses on producing ad content that social media users will post on their own networks. This particular marketing technique is effective because ads and content are created, based on what personal information users post on social media. Firms and organizations that advertise their brands on social media are more likely to increase their customer base and annual revenue. By doing so, companies are able to increase exposure of their brand and widen previous hidden, customer bases. As a marketer, the fine line between right and wrong is often blurred. The amount and

In society today, everything has a name for it. If the product doesn’t have a well-known name, it goes by name that a well-known product that is similar goes by. Branding has made its impact on society and it’s never going to go away. In this situation, all we can do from here is analyze more and more until we fully understand its presence in society and its effects. Branding has its biggest effects on consumerism, which makes us question consumerisms power in society. Has our society become one big, replicated consumer or can a consumer or even a person still be unique and individual? Branding creates competition amongst companies throughout the world and creates a competition for the consumers. Not only, it also creates issues, creates

1. A brief history of the brand: origins, key stages in its growth , etc.

Successfully marketing a product is a fundamental component in remaining competitive in the vicious dog-eat-dog world of business. The rise of postmodernism in society redefined what successful and adaptive marketing looks like and consequently it gave branding a whole new meaning and significance. Postmodernism means different things to different disciplines, yet the general consensus is that it is a contemporary cultural phenomenon (Brown 1996). The postmodern brand model enabled brands to have an identity that connects with its customers by presenting brands in an anthropological view via customer engagement promotions. The gradual domination of social media in western society enables organizations to market their brands to exist beyond

Also, social media can serve as brand evaluation forums where consumers evaluate the quality of the product or service by referring to other consumer’s review (Dwyer, 2007). So the brands need to handle UGC or all kind of conversation with consumers on social media platforms with care. If they are failure then the brand image will be damaged and destroyed and it would be very hard for them to rebuild the confident and brand

In recent years, social media has become the best available option for brands to communicate with prospective consumers. In other words, social media is an opportunity for brands to transcend the traditional middleman (Neti, 2011). One of the many positives is that companies can build their own brand communities easily on the social media. There are some obvious benefits of brand communities which are facilitating information sharing, spread the history and the culture of brands, providing help to customers, and positively influencing brand loyalty (Laroche, Habibi and Richard, 2013).

The relation brand-consumer changed aspect. The brands have to watch henceforth what people say of them on these social media and to begin the dialogue with their consumers to make sure to keep a good "e-reputation" and to enter a relational optics with their customers. But they can also benefit from these digital social networks to try to create consumers' community on-line "ambassadors" around them, to federate them and to develop loyalty of them thanks to a communication and specific tools.

There is no doubt that the customer is king because without customer, there is no business. Today, brand can easily attract or lose customers. With the increasing number of social platform and numbers of creating account, customers’ voices are raised among social media, web sites or forum. In fact, we can observe that, nowadays, customers don’t hesitate to question brands, to congratulate, to criticize and even to require that brand deliver them messages adapted to their profile and their interest. Particularly with