Zero Moment Of Truth

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.

We are successfully utilizing social media as a powerful way to gain positive exposure and connect with our internet-savvy customers in a global and local level. We rely heavily in word-of-mouth advocacy”. (John Mackey, 2012)

The internet has services for users to work together (Diva, 2017). In this essay, I will explain about which communication theories and forms of communication are used to influence consumers. I believe that symbolic interaction communication theory and social exchange impact and mass communication have more influence to consumers.

To maintain consumer satisfaction businesses have begun to implement blogs. Effective companies rely on the critical feedback from consumers via social media.

Yelp is a popular crowd-sourced local business review and social networking site. This paper aims to find out about how Yelp has impacted business’s. In my research I have found that Yelp impacts business’s positively and negatively. Consumers are becoming more familiar with online review sites like yelp, therefore putting more trust into them. These reviews are influencing potential new customers in the market. Positive reviews are associated with generating more profit and revenue.

“Online shopping retail sale are predicted to grow steadily to $370 billion in 2017, up from $231 billion in 2012.” (Abramovich, 2014). Today’s advancement in technology, consumers are becoming more enticed to shopping online with the rarity of limitations. With over millions of outlets, consumers can find just about anything within a click away. The following project explores three major Internet based companies who rightly communicated their performances throughout the years.

Customer Moment of Truth (MOT) can be defined as “In customer service, instance of contact or interaction between a customer and a firm (through a product, sales force, or visit) that gives the customer an opportunity to form (or change) an impression about the firm. Managing reputations and managing problems are especially important for service organizations. Services sell intangibles, through expectations and promises of what is to come. A critical moment, which

Building customer trust is a vital driver in successful relationships with customers and thus increases the chances of loyalty with customers. Consol is continuously finding new ways to surpass customers’ expectations of the benefits their product provides, both environmentally and with business relationships. They provide various sources online to verify each and every claim and make it easily available. To coincide with this positioning is the code of ethics the company has, which is visible on their website. These ethics, such as “Relationships with Clients, Customers and Suppliers”, is just another example of how they are effectively creating a trustworthy and honest employee and customer relationship. Many spectators believe a better method of gaining trust would be encouraging the use of online platforms for online reviews and feedback. (Pradhan, 2011) This is something that is made available but not extensively used nor have complaints gotten required feedback from management. Even so, the method of communicating the benefits the product provides is proving to establish trust effectively with the target market. On Facebook there page has over 40000 likes, so there customer base is clearly a large

Zappos’ has placed a great deal of emphasis on consumer satisfaction which has contributed to their profitability (Ferrell & Hartline, 2014). Consumer satisfaction is the key to consumer retention (Ferrell & Hartline, 2014). Fully satisfied consumers are more likely to become loyal consumers, even advocates for the organization and their products (Ferrell & Hartline, 2014). Satisfied consumers are less likely to explore alternative suppliers and their less press sensitive (Ferrell & Hartline, 2014). Therefore, satisfied consumers are less likely to switch to a different competitor (Ferrell & Hartline, 2014). Satisfied consumers are more likely to spread positive word-of-mouth about the organization and their products (Ferrell & Hartline, 2014). However, the way the consumers think about satisfaction

Looking for information is a highly important driver for a consumer to use social media platforms. Information quality refers to a consumer’s assessment of the information presented on a website based on accuracy, relevance, helpfulness, currency (being up-to-date), and unbiasness (Cao et al., 2005; Ou & Sia, 2010; Zhang & von Dran, 2000). Information is considered to be a key website feature that influences consumer behavior. Past research (Cao et al.; Day, 1997; Huizingh, 2000; Iyer, 2001; Katerattanakul & Siau, 1999; Ou & Sia; Zhang & von Dran) has found that information is highly important to the development of a company’s website to draw in and continue to attract online customers. Interacting with information is described as the “process people use in interacting with content” (Toms, 2002). If a brand post contains information about the brand or product, then the brand fans’ motivations to participate or consume the content of the brand post are realized.

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

According to Internet World Stats, there are 3,611,375,813 Internet users around the world as of June 30, 2016. Because of this, online customer reviews have become a vital component of businesses and are considered by many as a form of “social proof” where people take the word of others as proof that a particular product or service is valuable and worth getting.

Buying behaviour that occurs in blogs can differ significantly from the buying behaviour that occurs in other forms of social media. As stated before, blogs can portray several different forms of marketing that appeal to the consumers. Written from an unbiased point of view, consumers tend to put more weight into the opinion of other consumers than they would in other forms of advertisement such as banner ads or PR statements. The marketing efforts that can be found in blogs can have a huge impact on a consumer and therefore on the buying process in itself. (Solomon 2011, 137-139.)

Social media has played a significant role in consumer decision making, including such areas raising awarness, sharing information and opinions as well as postpurchase experience ( Mangold and Faulds,2009). It turns out that consumers tend to trust knowledge and experience shared by other customers on social media more than those opinions reviewed by the manufacturer or the marketer of the product or the service.(Linchi Kowk,2012)